


Moonflowers and Agave

by Eristastic



Series: Under(fairy)tales [8]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Enemies to Lovers, Idealism, Metamorphosis, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-06-04 17:44:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6668233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eristastic/pseuds/Eristastic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With a heart full of love and wonder, Asriel makes a pact to become a human for a month so he can go to be with the human he's loved from afar for so long.<br/>And yet, absolutely nothing goes the way he dreamt it would.</p><p> </p><p>[The Little Mermaid AU, finally]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. From First I Saw You

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's actually sticking surprisingly close to the themes of the original this time?

All his life, Asriel had loved humans.

Admittedly, he’d never met one. Even as the crown prince – even with just an hour’s walk along the white cliffs of his home before he came to the border between kingdoms – he’d never actually spoken to one. He had stories, though. There were so many, filled with heroism and gallantry and betrayal and romance and passion, and he’d lapped them all up during his childhood until humans were all he could think about.

But even the stories alone might not have been enough. It’s easy to admire something you’ve never seen, something you only hear about, but for Asriel to truly _love_ humans, it took a sunny day in late spring on the top of the cliffs.

He’d been sitting nestled against lichen-covered rocks, staring out at the crashing waves and wondering when people would start looking for him. It wasn’t often he went into sulks, so he had hoped it was sooner rather than later. He’d chosen his favourite spot, too: they had to know where he was. Pondering this in a disgruntled manner, something had caught his eye on a cliff to his right; on the human side of the border. Immediately, he’d gone still. This area was one he’d been walking for years, making it his own, and not once had he seen a single human, so it almost hadn’t felt real for a few seconds.

The human had sat down on the edge of the cliff so their legs were hanging off the side, one strong wind away from falling, and it had begun to sink in that it was really happening.

At that point, Asriel had been sitting up and trying to get the best view he could without being too obvious from behind his boulder. There had been some vague thoughts about how the chalky stone was the same colour as his fur and his clothes were light anyway so he wasn’t too likely to be seen, but all of that had cowered under his intense curiosity. He hadn’t been able to take his gaze off them, not even to blink.

That was what a human looked like. That was what a human was. Frail, in tightly-laced clothes, with proportions almost similar to his, but with skin and auburn hair instead of his fur and budding horns.

Asriel had felt he couldn’t breathe, and though he hadn’t been able to see their expression properly from his distance, he had known they were sighing. He had known they were upset.

That day, he had learned that love at first sight existed outside of the books he surrounded himself with.

After that, for two long years, he had waited for them almost every day on the cliffs by the sea. He took paper and ink to write the assignments his mother set him, books to pass the time, his sword if he had to practice fencing, and any other excuse he could give. It became normal: the prince spends every afternoon on the cliffs, even when it’s raining, even when it’s snowing, because he loves the view that much.

The human came sometimes. They never noticed him, as far as he could tell. Most times, they sat on the edge of the cliff. Occasionally they’d read as well, or lie on the grass and stare up at the sky. Sometimes they did stranger things.

He watched in confusion as they spent long afternoons twisting their arms, or digging in the earth with their bare hands, or looking over the edge so far that he was petrified they’d fall over. It didn’t make much sense to him, but humans were strange and foreign anyway: it was probably normal for them. It wasn’t as if he ever learnt about humans in the lessons his mother gave him. He learnt about the treaties his kingdom had with the neighbouring human kingdoms; he learnt about the history between them; he learnt about stories and myths and vague outlines of customs, but very little else. This didn’t exactly bother him: everything he needed to know was in the stories that the library was so well-stocked with.

So, for two years, he pined and dreamt and was satisfied.

When he turned sixteen, things changed.

 

It wasn’t the type of thing where you woke up one morning and everything was different. Asriel had had a lot of those (most recently his sudden desire and subsequent failure to try out archery), but this wasn’t that. It had been growing steadily louder: first the offhand thoughts that maybe he could call out to them across the cliffs for once to see what they did, then the occasional flights of fancy as he imagined asking their name, talking to them. It rose into urges to ask his parents if he could go across the border (and similar urges to just run there without saying a thing), and then the urges became questions he very almost asked.

‘ _Do you know the human family who lives just that side of the border? Do we have any reason at all to go and see them? Could a reason be made?_ ’

Sometimes he spent so long dreaming about it that he forgot he hadn’t actually been to see them. The human child was so good in his mind: they would be scared, at first, because they’d never have seen a monster, but then they’d talk and a smile would grow on their face and slowly they’d start to feel a lightness in their chest and then, and then-

And then he remembered it hadn’t happened. He didn’t even know their name.

That _had_ to change.  

A few weeks after his sixteenth birthday (a magnificent week-long coming-of-age celebration, so busy he’d even forgotten to go and see the human for more days than he usually missed in a month), he stood in front of his bedroom mirror and set his resolve into stone. He was going to go and see his father. He might have preferred to speak about it with his mother but she was away on business so his father would do very well instead. All morning, he’d changed outfits in an effort to find the one that made him feel the oldest, the most confident, and he’d finally settled on gold-trimmed sky blue robes that were clasped around his waist by gold rope. His trousers were the same colour, the same trimming, but a softer fabric. They’d been specially made at his request – a lot of his clothes had been, after he’d turned fourteen and decided he wanted to dress like the humans in the books he read. There were no pictures to go by, but his imagination filled in the blanks and the palace tailor helped with the rest.

And maybe his horns were still coming in, maybe he wasn’t even halfway through his growing phase yet, but he was still an adult, he was sure. So he had to do this. It was a matter of pride, and a matter of the heart.

With said heart thumping like a ceremonial drum in his ears, he marched through the palace to his father’s office.

The doors were closed, which meant he had to wait outside. He wilted a little at the anti-climax. Painfully aware of himself and his still-thundering pulse, he leant back against the white wood panelling, feeling tiny under the latticed arches of the ceiling. What was he even going to _say_? No, no, he’d practiced this: he knew the words, he knew what he had to do: it was fine. He was going to ask for time to go and visit the human kingdom (disregarding how unheard-of it was for a monster to do that unless there was no choice), he was going to say he wanted to learn more about human life (disregarding how monsters never interacted with humans much, so there was no point), he was going to make this work.

It was unfair that doubts would choose now of all times to plague him.

As he fidgeted with the ends of his sleeves, footsteps started to ring out in the corridor, echoing around like bells. He knew them: he didn’t have to turn around to know to brace himself as Undyne clapped him on the shoulder with force that would have bowled over a less experienced person. As it was, he smiled weakly up at her.

“Hey, Az!” she grinned, teeth gleaming even brighter than her armour.

“Hey, Undyne. You’re here to see Dad?”

“Sure am! I guess he’s busy though, right?”

Asriel sighed and looked at the door ruefully. “Looks that way. I’ve only been here for a few minutes, but he’s probably seeing an advisor or something.”

“And you’re skiving from the work your mum left you?”

“I might be.”

“Nice.” They shared a knowing smile.

“What are you here for?” Asriel bent his head so his ears almost touched his collarbone, twisting his boot into the marble floor. It was reflective enough – and the corridor was bright enough – that he could just make himself out in it.

“Paperwork,” Undyne said in much the same voice that most people would use to talk about maggot infestations.

“Ah. I guess even the head of the royal guard has to deal with that.” He knew she did, since she complained about it most days, but she liked having someone to complain to so he played the part.

“Ugh, tell me about it. You’d think I could shove the job off onto someone else.”

“Don’t you already do that?”

Her face split into another huge grin. “You bet! Ahh, Papyrus is great, love that kid. Anyway, Az. Want to go wait somewhere else for a bit?”

It seemed a weird thing to ask, but Asriel nodded anyway. Putting off the nerve-wracking meeting was something he could get behind, so he followed her down the corridor and out into one of the bridges across the slow-moving river that ran through the palace grounds. It was connected to the corridor they’d just been in; an open construction of white stone pillars and filigree work around carvings of flowers. The river itself was almost totally purple with wisteria petals; the vines hanging heavy with flowers scaled all up the sides of the palace. There were other plants too: the pillar Asriel stood next to on the bridge was caged in moonflowers. He reached out to play with the petals of one while he waited for Undyne to speak.

“Your parents are kind of worried about you,” she said in something approaching a normal tone.

“They are?”

“’Course they are, you big goof! You’ve been moody ever since your birthday! What, you think you can just start being all evasive and shit and no one’ll care?”

“I don’t think I’ve been _that_ bad.”

“Eh,” she shrugged, leaning against one of the pillars in an effortlessly cool pose Asriel could only dream of imitating. “Spend enough time around you and it shows. So what’s the deal, kid?”

It wasn’t unusual for his parents to send Undyne to ask him about things. He’d grown up with her always around, and while it wasn’t as if it was difficult to talk to his parents about some things, there were always going to be exceptions.

This happened to be one of those exceptions where even talking to her seemed difficult, but he tried.

“Um…I want to go across the border. Just for a visit!” he clarified after seeing the look on her face. “I just want to, uh, learn more about human customs and stuff…”

“You can’t lie for shit, you know that?” Her face – wildly expressive at the best of times – was carved into a frown he hated to see from her. “You _know_ how dangerous humans are, Az.”

“I know! I know that, I know the history, I know, but…”

“But you still want to go.”

“Yeah,” he nodded miserably.

“Why? This had better not because of all those books you’re always reading. We _knew_ they’d be a bad influence.”

“Undyne, that’s not it!” That was almost totally it. “I…um, there’s someone I want to see.”

For a few seconds, she looked at him blankly. The wind picked up around them, shaking up the heavy perfume of the flowers and blowing her ponytail in poppy-red strands. Then her grin was back.

“You’ve got a crush,” she said gleefully.

“Undyne!” His voice came out a lot higher and more scandalised than he would have liked, but she’d seen him in more humiliating situations so he couldn’t quite care. “Don’t just…! I mean! Don’t smile at me like that!”

“You totally do. Oh my god, our boy’s finally growing up.”

“Undyne!” He could feel blood rushing to his cheeks and his hands were already flapping at his sides – he had to ball them into fists. “This isn’t funny!”

“It so is!” In two giant strides, she was hugging him and grinding her knuckles into the top of his head in her bizarre expression of affection. He weathered it. “I can’t believe you had to go and start crushing on a human, but still! What are they like? Where do you guys meet?”

“We…we don’t really _meet_ …” he mumbled into her shoulder, face burning. “I’ve, um…this is going to sound really weird, but I’ve been seeing them across the cliffs for the last few years, and I love them, I really do! But I’ve never actually spoken to them before.”

“That’s pretty weird,” she agreed, releasing him from the chokehold-like hug. “But you’re you! If you say you love them, you love them and I’m all for it!”

Hearing her say that was enough to make Asriel feel like preening, but he settled for beaming at her instead. “Thanks! That…that means a lot. But now I’m just not sure what to do! I want to go and see them, but what if they get scared because I’m a monster and they’ve never seen one before? So I thought it’d be better if I went on official business or something, but that’s going to be difficult too, and I just…I want to talk to them. I’m so tired of not having the courage.”

Undyne slapped him on the back heavily. “None of that! You want to meet them? You’ll meet them: we’ll make it work! And if you can’t do it the way you are, and you can’t do it as the prince…how about you make a pact?”

“A pact?”

“Yeah! Make a pact with the moon goddess, duh. She’ll do something about it. No clue what, but if you ask her, she’ll help you out!”

“Oh. Um. Okay.” Asriel wasn’t all that familiar with the moon goddess (she was a specialised cult, and most of the kingdom tended to give thanks to the stars instead), but he’d take any help he could get. “How should I make the pact?”

“Just go on down to the temple at full moon and pray to her, she’ll talk back. I’ve done it loads of times, it’s cool. And don’t worry: it’ll definitely work for you, even if she usually favours people like me and Alphys more.”

Asriel thought about this. “You mean like monsters with scales?”

For a second, Undyne paused. “That too.”

Deciding not to worry about the cryptic comment, Asriel smiled as widely as he could and thanked her. It was a huge weight off his mind: if the moon goddess could handle it, then he wasn’t going to worry about it. She was a goddess: everything was going to be fine if he asked her, and he could go and ask his father about it afterwards, once the better part of the work was already done.

And so, two nights later, he snuck out of the palace at one in the morning to go down to the temple.

The timing was critical: he didn’t want anyone to notice him (because it was embarrassing), and he knew from discussions with Undyne that the guard changed at one for the second night shift. So, padding down the huge, sand-coloured paving stones that led out of the palace and up to the temples, he clung to shadows. He wasn’t under any delusions that he was great at stealth, not with his body that was still growing too fast for him to be quite used to it, but he could at least try.

The stairs that went up to the temple building were lined with thick bushes of moonflowers, glistening bright white in the moonlight, and the coloured tiles of the stairs themselves were all shining silver. Clinging to the worn wooden handlebar, Asriel leapt up them two at a time until he was high above the palace; until he looked down to see that the sea was even further beneath him, black waves cresting like ripples. Everything was dark, and so tiny from where he was. Gulping down his laboured breath, he walked at a steadier pace.

The temple itself was small: the main room where people went to pray was empty apart from an altar and thick reed mats to kneel on. The wooden roof had a shutter in it: the weather being good, this was open so the moon shone down pleasantly into the room and lit up all the mother-of-pearl plates decorating the walls. Some were plain, others were carvings of figures, often of distinctly feminine couples. Their positions weren’t ambiguous. Asriel kept his eyes on the altar.

Kneeling gingerly in front of it, he put his hands flat on the mat and rested his forehead on them.

‘ _Please_ ,’ he thought fiercely. ‘ _I want to meet them. I love them so much that it hurts, so much that I think I’ll never be able to love anyone else, and I want to meet them. Please help me._ ’

He wasn’t sure what to expect. A flash of light and the goddess in front of him? A sudden tingle of moonlight all over his body? Whatever he might have expected, nothing happened. He stayed there, prostrated, until his arms started to ache and his legs threatened to cramp up. Still, he didn’t move. This had to work. Undyne had promised, so it was going to work. He just had to wait.

For uncountable time, he stayed quite still, and after a while he began to feel sleep eating at him. That wasn’t good: he couldn’t fall asleep now. What would people say if they found him here in the morning? He tried to force his eyes to stay open, tried to concentrate on the press of rough reeds against his arms, on the dull pain in his body, but nothing worked. It was all fuzzy, sounds and colours mixing as painfully wide yawns forced their way out of his mouth. Before he could work out whether it was worth risking movement to wake himself up, it was too late.

 

‘ _Do you really mean it? You really want to meet them so terribly?_ ’

A soft voice. Lies and hidden truths were impossible. “I mean it. I love them. I want to meet them.”

‘ _My. Well, if that truly is your choice, I would be delighted to do this for you, my dear young one. I will give you a month: until the next full moon, you shall be human. You shall walk among them, and you shall meet the one you love. But I must warn you, my magic is only so strong, precious one. Should you speak of your love, even a word of it, the spell will unravel and you will be as you are. Your true identity and name are also to be kept secret. Do you still wish it?_ ’

A flush of happiness, of tenderness. “With all my heart.”

‘ _Then I wish you well, my dear_.’

 

Morning came brightly. Loudly, too: Asriel woke to a shriek. Blearily, he sat up. His clothes were baggy, he found, and everything was too cold. Too small. Wrong. He stared up at the temple-minder’s fear in confusion, and then he remembered.

Without waiting for much more than to give her a quick apology, he sprinted out of the temple and back to the palace.

He went looking for Undyne first, of course. She’d be up and training, he knew, so he ran through corridors and plazas that were just shy of empty, holding his clothes up as best he could and trying not to stumble with his new centre of gravity. New feet too: they hurt, crushing against pebbles and gravel like his feet never had before. Smaller lungs, burning with effort in half the time. Muscles that tired too easily. He was a wreck by the time he made it to the training fields.

Undyne was close to the entrance and she saw him before anyone else did. Her face curled up into a snarl and for a moment he couldn’t understand it, so he called her name and she froze, lowering her spear.

“Az…?”

Behind her, the royal guard began to look over, whispering amongst themselves, but Asriel didn’t bother himself about them.

“It’s me!” he called, chest heaving for breath completely unhelpfully. “It’s me: I…I called on the…the moon goddess. She…she did this for me.”

For a long minute, Undyne was totally silent, and that gave Asriel the chance to catch his breath and feel the unpleasant drip of sweat down his skin. It was so weird: all of it felt strange and unnatural and totally inefficient. He’d never gotten this hot from that amount of running before, even with a heavy fur coat. His spindly little fingers curled in the material at his hips.

Finally, Undyne seemed to reach a decision. She marched over to him and grabbed his arm, pulling him away from the training fields and the eyes that followed the pair of them. She didn’t speak until they got to her rooms, deep in the palace. There, she let go of him and closed the door carefully behind her. It was a cool room, well-ventilated by latticed windows, and Asriel was grateful.

“That’s a hell of a job she did on you,” Undyne remarked after an uncomfortable silence.

“Does it…does it look okay?”

“You haven’t? Ah, I guess you haven’t, huh? Look in the mirror.”

Obediently, Asriel walked over to the wall-length mirror in the corner, next to the wall of spears and spear-related cleaning items. His breath caught in his throat.

‘Lanky’ was the word that came to mind, though he wasn’t sure he wanted it to. Maybe it was just because his clothes were huge on him now, but everything looked long and thin. His skin, still shiny with sweat in places, was somewhere near the colour of sand – not as light as his human’s, but nowhere near Undyne’s blue, for example, if comparisons were going to be made. His face was a face, and a lot of it was covered by strands of white hair. The hair fascinated him: it was so soft and straight, reaching somewhere around his neck (thinner and longer than before), and it moved so freely compared to fur. He couldn’t stop touching it.

In the mirror, he noticed Undyne was grinning at him.

“What?”

“You’re such a wuss,” she said, poking one of his arms (admittedly a lot thinner than hers).

“Undyne! It’s a loan body, it’s not my fault!”

Her grin was getting wider, and while he could really do without the constant teasing, it was comforting after seeing her anger at this body.

“You’re still a wuss,” she laughed. “Ah, Az. What the hell am I going to tell your dad? He’s going to be so pissed.”

“You think?” He leaned closer to the mirror, taking comfort in the fact that his eye colour was the same as before, at least.

“Duh! You know how people feel about humans around here! Hell, when I saw you just now, I was…” She looked away. “I’m just saying, Az, it’s going to be worse for the ones old enough to remember the war, and the stuff before the treaties. Your dad’s not going to be happy.”

“Oh.” He brushed soft, supple finger pads over his cheeks, nose, lips – all softer and smoother than anything he’d had before. He wondered if his human felt the same. “What…what do you think I should do?”

“What do you want to do?” She cocked her head to the side, raising an eyebrow, but sort of ruined the effect by grabbing his wrist and pulling it back from his face. “Okay, seriously, stop with that for a second.”

“Right, sorry. Um. I…I want to go there. The goddess said I have a month, so I want to go as soon as possible and be with them. I think…maybe I could suggest I go to learn human customs or something?”

“That dumb excuse again? Why not just tell him you’re in love?”

“That’s embarrassing!”

“You moron: he’s going to be pleased! About that. The human part, not so much.” She sighed heavily and let go of his arm so he could go back to touching his hair. “Okay. I’ll talk to him first, so get your story straight. And you _owe_ me for this one, punk! So what are you going to say?”

Asriel moved back from the mirror and thought about it.

 

“You have fallen in love with a human you have never spoken to and, without seeking my or your mother’s advice, you prayed to the moon goddess to help you and now you wish to go across the border alone,” Asgore repeated dully.

Asriel nodded without much conviction. Undyne was next to him, both of them on the other side of Asgore’s desk, but the room still felt far too big and echoing. He knew his father hated spending too much time in here and it showed: the office was impersonal and unwelcoming. Asgore’s frown was worse, though.

A few tense moments, and then the frown fizzled out into a sigh. He looked pained. “My son, this was not a wise decision.”

“I know.”

“Then why make it? Why did you not ask me for guidance? I would gladly have given it, you know that.”

“I know, Dad.” He was feeling more and more like a child with every passing second. It didn’t help that he was so much shorter all over again. He hadn’t even had the chance to change into clothes that fit, though he had no idea where he’d find them anyway.

“I cannot condone this. It is folly, to go into the human’s territory without protection.”

“But I’ll _be_ a human!” he protested. “I know humans hurt humans a lot, but they won’t hurt me straight away. I’ll have a _chance_ , Dad! I’ll have a chance to make them love me, because they’ll never love me if I’m a monster!”

His voice had been too loud, he realised. Undyne was looking at him with her mouth slightly open, and he couldn’t decipher his father’s expression. It was horrible. It shouldn’t have been like this: the moon goddess had been so sweet, so gentle, and he’d been led to believe that it could be easy. This was something he had to do. He knew he was the prince – he knew he had responsibilities – but he had responsibilities towards himself as well, and he needed this.

He didn’t know how to say that without sounding like a child.

“Asriel.”

He straightened up, trying to remember all his comportment lessons even in this foreign body.

“This is not something a prince does,” Asgore said sadly.

It wasn’t fair. He was in love and there was nothing he could do about it because he was the stupid prince. It wasn’t _fair_. He opened his mouth to retaliate, but his father got there first.

“It is not something a prince does,” he repeated, “and I am sorry for that. I can see what it means to you. I can see that you felt you had no choice, and I know you would not have prayed to the goddess if you had known this would be the outcome.”

Asriel didn’t correct him.

“You work hard and you try your best, and I do not want you to think that there is nothing beyond that for you. Neither your mother nor I ever wanted you to be trapped in this position. But you must see, my child, that this is impossible.”

“But it’s not,” he mumbled, his jaw trembling treacherously. “Dad, look at me: this is possible! I can go there, pretend I’ve lost all my memories of my past life or something, beg them to take me in. It could work.”

“You plan to live with them?” His voice was unfathomable and Asriel had no idea what the right answer was, so he went for the truth.

“Yes. I…Dad, I really love them.”

“And if they will not have you?”

“Then I’ll come back.”

“And if they are the child of a poor family, with barely enough to get by themselves?”

“Then I’ll work for my stay. I’m a hard worker, right? I can do it. It’s…it’s just a month, Dad.”

Asgore’s expression was still too sad to be encouraging. Asriel wanted to sneak a look at Undyne for reassurance, but he didn’t know if she _would_ be reassuring, so his gaze slipped to the piles of paper on his father’s desk.

“Answer me honestly: would your mother let you do this?”

“No.” He didn’t have to think about it.

“And what do you suggest I tell her, when she comes back?”

“That I did it of my own accord?”

“That is not good enough, Asriel. Think.”

It wasn’t something he’d bothered to think about at all: his parents’ reactions had been watery walls in his plans, without any real form or thickness. He hadn’t known or wanted to know what they would say. It hadn’t mattered, not when he was so set on meeting with his human.

But he thought about it now. He wasn’t alone in this: he had a country behind him. More than that, he had parents behind him who would be affected by what he did. He wasn’t a solitary person. He was a son.

“I…Can I write a letter for you to give her when she comes back? I only have this month, so I can’t wait, but…I think I should tell her myself.”

For the first time that meeting, Asgore smiled. “That would be a better solution than lying, I think. And what should I tell everyone else?”

He gave this one thought as well, but it wasn’t as easy. “Say…say I’ve gone to further my education and understanding of humans, first-hand. As befits a future king.”

The smile waned, but Asgore nodded anyway. “That might be acceptable. But you must understand I cannot let you go alone into the humans’ territory.”

“Why not?” It felt like the wrong answer the second it was out of his mouth, and he hurried to fix it. “Dad, I can fight. Even in this body, I know what to do. If I come with a posse of monsters, they’ll just react worse. It has to be me alone. You have to trust that I can do this.”

It was such an unfair thing to say. He saw his father wince, just slightly.

Undyne leapt in with awkward energy. “Asgore, I can spend tomorrow training him one-on-one, make sure he’s used to this body! That’ll give us time to get clothes for him and so on.”

“And I’ll only be just across the border!” Asriel added helpfully. “I know that’s a world away, but Dad, I feel like I can do this. I’ve barely even left the palace before: I don’t want to stay cooped up in here my whole life until I take the throne. I want to see how they live too. I think this would be really good for me. And my human, I just…I love them so much, Dad, I _need_ this.” The arguments spilling from his lips felt weak and muddled, wrapped up in his voice that was still his, even in this body.

Again, Asgore sighed. He looked so much older than he had the day before. There was no doubt in Asriel’s mind that he’d be allowed to go, but he wondered if this was worth it.

Of course it was. How could he think that?

“Two days,” Asgore said finally, heavily, as if he were talking to the polished wood of his desk. “One to train, one for me to teach you as much as I can about humans. Then you may go. I will not keep you from what your heart needs.”

Asriel tried not to rejoice too much.

 

The clifftop was strange to him. His small bag of belongings – a change of clothes, some food, a knife, and some other things – was resting against a tree trunk a little way away from him. The wind was strong here, ruffling his hair all over his face. It was annoying: did people with fringes really deal with this all the time? He could have cut it off, of course, but…

But he liked the way he looked. Even with the white hair, he liked it.

So he curled his hands until the knuckles went stark white against the dry grass. He touched one hand with the fingers of the other, feeling the bones – so prominent under his touch, like he’d never felt before. It was the same for his collarbone, his cheekbones, his wrists, his ribs, his ankles. So much hardness, but it all looked soft.

Humans were…

He didn’t know. He liked it.

But he was nervous: what if his human didn’t come? What if he had to tramp back and admit that he’d have to put it off until the next day, and the next and the next? Wouldn’t his father decide it wasn’t worth it? Asriel thought he’d prefer to stay here, on this clifftop, for as long as it took rather than go back.

The wind howled in his ears, and the waves’ crashing was dim beneath him. He watched the sea, waiting with a racing pulse that fluttered in the sides of his neck, and a chest so buoyant he thought it might take flight. Then there were footsteps.

He didn’t look up until the crunch of their shoes stopped abruptly a few paces from him, so the first thing he saw was their face. Their eyes were red: both the colour (startling, cutting into him) and the skin around them. They were wide, too, staring at him in shock. The wind whipped their hair without once going into their face awkwardly.

Asriel had never seen anyone more beautiful.

His voice caught in his throat and he couldn’t say a thing, could barely breathe as their whole body trembled before stiffening into a wooden pose. With mechanical movements, they sat down some way from him.

He found he could talk, but he didn’t know what to say.

Terrified the wind would steal his voice away before it could reach them, he spoke loudly and without thinking about it, just to make contact. “H-hello! Um…are you from around here?”

They nodded once, stiffly. The only soft thing about their stance was their hair as it fell from their shoulders at the tilt of their head.

A story: he had a story to stick to. “My name’s Ree. I, uh, I sort of found myself here a little while ago, on the beach. I don’t really remember anything. At all.”

Their eyes were fixed on the sea below like it was the only thing that existed for them. They nodded stiffly again.

“Can I ask your name?”

“I am Chara.” A stiff voice to match the rest, but he couldn’t care: he had a _name_. After so long, he finally had a name to call them.

With renewed enthusiasm, he started to say something before realising that their expression was getting worryingly mask-like. Wide eyes, artificial smile, unflinching gaze.

“Are you…um, are you alright?”

They didn’t answer. The wind was too loud: he cursed it, cursed everything that stopped him from hearing anything that might come out of their lips.

“Only, uh…I’m happy to listen, if you need to talk.” He wanted to, so much, because he wanted to know them and everything about them. He thought.

It wasn’t certain from where he was, but he thought their breathing got heavier. They didn’t say anything. He wished, for a brief second, that his father were with them: he would know what to do to get them talking. He always knew.

But Asriel was alone, like he’d wanted. He tried again. “Please, you seem troubled.”

“Troubled?” Finally, they spoke, but it wasn’t in a voice that he’d wanted to hear. It was harsh and tainted with the hollow smile they wore. “Yes, you might say that. After all, I come to be away from my family for one fucking hour and I find my only haven is already occupied by you. Troubled is a word for it. It isn’t the word I’d use.” They laughed. Stiffly, of course.

Asriel’s breath was caught again, but for a totally different reason. His once-volatile heart felt somewhere in the vicinity of his feet, or perhaps the breakers below. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to be smiling at him shyly, or at least in curiosity. They weren’t supposed to be grinning like it was all they could do to stop from shattering.

They were nothing like he’d thought, and the idea was choking him.

Were two years of fantasies really worth as little as that? Were two years of dreams really so worthless, that they could melt into bile to burn him from the inside out?

Why was this going wrong? Why were they walking away? What had he _done_?

Grabbing his things, Asriel followed them along the clifftop as they walked back the way they’d come. He hadn’t eyes for anything but them, not even the scenery laying itself out in front of him in a pattern he’d never seen before. They were everything, because they were the only one who could change this.

“Why are you following me?!” they cried hoarsely.

“I don’t have anywhere to go!” he screamed back. It was only a half-lie, it felt to him.

“Why the ever-loving _fuck_ should I care about that? Leave me alone!”

“I can’t!” So honest it laid him raw, but they just shouted something in frustration, something he couldn’t even hear. They didn’t turn around. He kept following them.

It was a miserable journey. He couldn’t go back. He _couldn’t_ : that would be admitting he was wrong. That would be admitting to the faint swell of disgust he felt. At himself, at them, he didn’t know. This wasn’t what he’d wanted. How could he have known this would happen? Was it normal to be that rude in first meetings? Why were they being like this?

Why did he have to feel the humiliating drain of what had been love? It hurt. It was as if it was physically hurting him in this stupid body, everything wrong, but hope still had the audacity to raise its head and suggest that this might be a misunderstanding. It was all wrong but he couldn’t stop walking.

Some way from where they’d started, Chara stopped walking suddenly, and turned to face him. Their glare looked painted onto their face, and even now he couldn’t stop thinking they were beautiful. It _hurt_.

“Leave me alone.”

“I can’t,” he said again, but quieter. “I don’t know where else to go.”

“That isn’t my problem.”

“I know. It’s mine.”

Their lip curled in frustration and it was ugly to him. “Fine. You know what? If you want to trail like some pathetic lost duckling, fine. You can come along and make my parents loathe me even more than they already do.” With that said, they turned on their heel and stalked off again.

Asriel, not knowing what else he could do, followed.


	2. I Still Resent You, My Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> General warning for physical child abuse (it won't actually be shown, but it's not just implied either).

Chara’s home was a villa by the sea, just far enough down the cliffs that there was no chance of too much sand blowing over from the dunes, and just a short walk from where the land began to rise up to the border. Even Asriel’s wretchedness couldn’t stop him from admiring it: it was all straw-coloured stone and pillars, open rooms and windows with gently-coloured curtains blowing softly. The whole estate seemed to stretch on as far as he could see: stables and storage huts and gardens of every imaginable type were there for him to gape at.

There were humans, too, more humans than he’d ever dreamed of seeing in his life. They all looked so different. Most wore plainer clothes than Chara did, and their skin, hair, heights and sizes were so variable that Asriel almost couldn’t believe it for a second. From what his books had told him, humans all looked roughly the same.

Some of the other humans stared at the two of them as they came closer to the house, and Asriel found himself casting his eyes down and hiding behind the snowy white of his hair. He knew he looked like one of them, so there was no danger, but it was still kind of unnerving. Not scary, of course. He wasn’t scared. He just wished they’d stop staring.

For their part, Chara barely paid the other humans any attention. Occasionally they nodded stiffly, but mostly they kept their head down and strode on up the wide, sandy path that led to the house’s main entrance. The other humans seemed to have enough work to be getting on with, anyway: eventually they stopped whispering and looking. But still, Asriel could almost be glad that his new ears were so much weaker than his old ones. He didn’t want to hear what they were saying, so he clutched his bag to his chest and hurried after Chara on legs too long to use with dignity.

Though the flower gardens he’d seen coming down the cliffs had been filled with as many different flowers as he could have dreamt up, the land immediately surrounding the house was mostly beds of gravel and sand, or small ponds and delicately curving streams. Lining these were giant plants Asriel had never seen before: they easily came up to his shoulders, and were shaped like roses if each petal were a thick, blade-shaped leaf. Some of the leaves were spiky, and Asriel stayed well away from them, sticking to the middle of the path.

After an eternity, it seemed to him, he followed Chara inside. The burning heat left his skin almost immediately in the shade, and he could have sighed in relief if his throat wasn’t being occupied by his heart, he was so nervous. The two of them walked through countless open-doored chambers, climbing up sandstone stairs and across mosaic floors in blue and green and red, making their way through the maze of the house’s layout. They passed more people, all of whom lowered their eyes when they saw Chara for some reason, before looking up again in shock at Asriel. He tried to smile weakly at them, but they looked away too quickly.

There were flowers inside, too: vases upon vases of tall, hanging lilies or bright clusters of anemones, or sometimes just decorative dried grasses and cattails. Asriel couldn’t stop looking at them, trying to take in as much of it all as he could (not that he thought he had a hope of remembering the way they were going), but Chara never broke their pace. In their tightly-laced clothes and sharp-heeled boots, they strode on at a speed just shy of running. Even when they walked through a giant room with a decorative fountain and shutters that opened the entire side onto a garden vista, they didn’t stop. Asriel was already beginning to sweat in his stupid, inefficient human body: he couldn’t imagine what it was like for them, when their clothes were so much tighter and heavier. Whatever they felt, they didn’t show it. It was like their every muscle was locked up tightly.

After they’d walked far enough for Asriel to be well and truly lost, Chara finally turned into a side room and pointed.

“Go in there, if you must.”

With that said, they were gone again, but Asriel didn’t have the heart to follow them anymore. They didn’t want him. They didn’t like him: they didn’t even tolerate him. So he walked into the room and shut the door behind him. It was a strange thing: a frame of wood covered in opaque paper. He wondered what they did when it rained, with doors like that and so many open windows.

The windows were open in this room too, so he put his bag down on the chair stuck behind a small desk, spared a quick glance for the bookcases lining the walls, and crossed the tiled floor to look outside. He had to force the shutter door a little, but it did eventually open, and then he walked out onto a balcony only to have all the breath stolen from his lungs.

Even on the tops of the cliffs, even from the highest rooms of his palace, he’d never seen anything like the view from Chara’s home. Far to his left, breakers crashed cheerfully against silky-soft sand; further inland the dunes turned to dusty grass which grew steadily greener – silvery as it blew in the wind – and finally gave way to the gardens. There were so many, going on so far, and Asriel couldn’t take it all in.

From what he could see, there were rows and rows of tulips glowing like jewels, in deep purple, rich butter-yellow and sunset orange streaked with red. There were trees drooping with pink blossoms, decorative ponds with open lilies like stars, patches of delicate white and blue flowers, creeping roses of every colour, herds of honeysuckle and hollyhocks, and so many more he could never put a name to. As a breeze dusted over his skin, he caught the mixing scents of herbs.

A knock came from behind him, and he wheeled round to see a human with their hand against the doorframe. The hope that had burst into fleeting life in his chest died (he’d been an idiot for thinking Chara would knock, anyway), but he stood up as straight as he could, trying to find where to fit his limbs so he would look as if he had at least some measure of poise.

“Hello!” he smiled as brightly as he could. For a fraction of a second, he was scared the human would act like Chara had – maybe there was just something wrong with _him_ , maybe it really was all his fault – but then they beamed back and waved.

Walking in, they shut the door behind them and put a small tray on the low, reed-woven table that sat just across from the desk with two chairs by it. There was a crystal glass of a pale pink liquid, the sides dripping with condensation, but Asriel was more interested by the human who brought it. They barely came up to his chest, their hair was a cloud of dark curls, their skin was the same colour as the desk they stood in front of, and they had a wider smile than he’d ever seen on a human before.

Not that that was saying much.

“Howdy! I, um, I’m Ree,” he said, forgetting for a second.

The human smiled even wider. Their fingers were twisting in the fabric of their shirt like they were playing an instrument, but it didn’t seem to be out of nervousness. In a quiet, soft voice that lilted with an accent, they said, “My name is Frisk.”

Asriel could tell it wasn’t their first language, so he switched from the lingua franca used by upper class humans and monsters alike to this country’s language. Hesitating, trying to remember what the neuter inflections for the polite second person were, he said, “Uh, is this your home? There are…there are a lot of people in this house. I was surprised. I didn’t think so many people lived here.”

Frisk, who had seemed to sparkle with happiness when he changed languages, blinked. “We do live here, but most of us are the serving staff.”

“Serving staff?”

The two of them looked blankly at each other. Now he thought about it, Frisk seemed to be just a year or two younger than him, despite their size (or maybe he was just unusually tall? He hoped so), but they looked younger in their ill-fitting clothes, the same as most of the other humans had been wearing. Plain, serviceable. Memories raised their head, yawning and brushing off the dust, and something clicked.

“Oh, _servants_.” The idea of servants in books was so difficult to reconcile with real people: these weren’t shadows, cleaning up and serving in the corners. How was he to have known?

“Did you…did you not know?”

“No, I mean, I knew, I just…um. We don’t have servants where I come from.”

Frisk tilted their head. “Where’s _that_?”

“Uh, I…” He realised he’d messed up, and hurried to fix it. “I mean, I don’t remember. So maybe we did have them? I don’t really remember anything about where I came from, so…haha.”

Miraculously, they seemed to take that as a satisfactory answer, and they drew out one of the chairs from the small table, gesturing that he should sit. It seemed bizarre that they’d pull his chair out for him, but he reminded himself that servants were like that. He was going to have to get used to it, so – smiling awkwardly – he sat down in the brocaded embrace of the chair. The stuffing was hard, in a way that held the shape of the sitter after a time.

Frisk stood against the wall, hands behind their back, and smiled, bobbing their head back and forth with their eyes fixed on the wall opposite. Asriel wondered for a few seconds what they were doing, but they seemed content so he left them to it. He did remember that servants were supposed to be invisible, or something. Maybe they were trying for that. He still had questions, but to respect their efforts he didn’t ask them.

The drink was welcome. It sparkled in his mouth, tickling down his throat with a feeling fresher than mint, sweeter than strawberries. There was something acidic in it too. He took another sip, the glass slippery under his skin so he had to hold it in both hands.

There was nothing much to do. He didn’t know what to do. Not now, and not in the coming month either. He had no idea.

He couldn’t go back: his pride wouldn’t let him.

To distract himself, he looked around the room. It was nowhere near as big as most of the other rooms, maybe half the size of his bedroom at home. The walls were made of light wood, carved beautifully in flowery designs. Bookcases took up much of the space, and the desk was covered in inkwells and scattered paper that fluttered lightly in the breeze. Asriel had the sudden urge to go and read them, but he didn’t move.

“I, um,” he said, looking at his half-drunken glass. “What kind of people are the family that lives here? I mean, there’s, um, there’s just one family that owns all of this, right? That’s how it works?”

Frisk peeled themself off the wall and seem to take on life again, like a moth buzzing into the air after resting immobile on a sunny patch of wall. They stood behind the other chair, their fingers playing with the framing.

“They’re good people.”

“Are they?” An embarrassing amount of hope found its way into his voice and he choked it down.

Frisk nodded, looking a little pensive. “There’s the master and mistress, and three children. They’re all good people.” They nodded again, seeming satisfied with what they’d said.

“The, uh…the children. What are they like?”

“Well, there’s the oldest, Miss Violet, then Miss Heather, and then…” they stopped, furrowing their forehead a little as if debating something rather than confused. Just when they seemed to come to a decision, the door slammed open.

Chara stood like a statue in the doorway. Frisk jumped back to their place at the wall but Asriel barely even noticed: his eyes were held by the sharp red mark that was now on Chara’s cheek. It looked like it had to smart.

He swallowed.

“Ah…Chara, are you-”

“You can stay,” they said stiffly, as if each word had to be forced out of their mouth at knifepoint. They turned to Frisk and their expression softened a hair, but not in the right way. They looked weaker. “He’s to keep to my rooms, and not to be seen by the family unless asked for.”

With that, they turned on their heel and stormed away. The room seemed a world emptier without them in it.

Asriel didn’t want to look over at Frisk and their game of invisibility. He didn’t want to look at anything but the empty doorway. All he wanted was for them to come back, to say something kind to him and to at least give the impression that they might not be disgusted with his very existence.

But he’d imposed on them. He’d been the one to ask them for help, and they’d given it. They hadn’t had to, and they certainly hadn’t had to do it graciously.

And that was all well and good, he supposed, but not for _them_. Not when they were supposed to fall in love with him at first glance just like he had them. It was idiocy, pure and simple, to think so, but he couldn’t scrape the thought away. It wouldn’t leave him.

A month. He had a month.

Frisk was sensitive enough to leave, at least. After sending him yet another smile (vaguely apologetic, this time), they slipped out of the room to give him space he sorely needed. Maybe twenty minutes later, when he was somewhat more himself – his chin in his hands, gazing unseeingly at the gardens so they all looked like blotches of colour amidst green – there was a small knock at the door and they popped their head around.

“Would you like to come this way?” It seemed a real question, so he smiled and nodded. With his bag in hand, he followed them out of the office. Walking quickly without ever seeming hurried, they led him into a winding set of corridors that appeared to go behind most of the rooms, like the bones in fish flesh. These corridors didn’t have any of the flowers or pretty tiled floors that the rest of the house had: they were tall and thin, freezing with thick stone walls and floors that seemed like they should have been dusty but weren’t.

As they turned a corner, Frisk gestured out with a hand and, unthinkingly, Asriel took it. He only realised that wasn’t what they’d meant when they blinked several times at his hand, at him, and then grinned. They squeezed before he could take it back, and then the two of them were walking again, past the crack in the floor that Frisk had apparently meant to warn him of.

Once, they passed another servant. The way was a bit crowded for that: they had to cling to the icy touch of the walls, and the woman kept looking back at them once they’d passed by. That was fair enough: Asriel kept looking back at her too, until she turned a corner, making the candles that hung on the walls flicker.

They did eventually come back into the main house. Frisk waited until Asriel was out into the room before shutting the door to the corridor behind them. From the outside, it looked like part of the panelling. The room they had come into was built with several layers: three steps that went all the way round the sides, leading to a tastefully decorated seating area in the middle. The inevitable windows on one side were shuttered firmly closed. There were doors all around the other walls, and Frisk led him to one of these which turned out to be a small bedroom. It looked barely lived in, as if it was just there for the sake of being there.

“I think you can stay in here,” they whispered to him. They didn’t seem to speak much louder than that. “I asked, and no one really knew what to do, so this might be the best option. These rooms are theirs,” –here, Frisk used a neutral pronoun so archaically respectful that Asriel had only read it in classics– “so I think it should be okay.”

“Ah, alright.” Asriel looked around him a little awkwardly. A bed, a dresser, a chair in one corner, and that was about all it amounted to. “I, um…I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do. Sorry, uh, do you have any idea?”

Frisk gave it a gratifying amount of thought, before coming up with a cheerful shrug. “Who knows?”

 

The first week was awful. Chara didn’t come to see him: they stayed well away, so the only signs of them he had were the sounds of their bedroom door opening and closing across the main room, often late at night. He didn’t know what they did in the day. He didn’t know where they went. He didn’t want to find out, most of the time. What could that possibly change? They hated him, and he felt a shameful amount of resentment for them.

After an extremely boring first day spent cooped up in Chara’s rooms (because he wasn’t to be seen, or thought of, least of all by them), Frisk brought him several books and a bag along with breakfast after his first night.

The windows were fully open in the main room (if Chara wanted them closed, they could come and close them themself), the wind blowing through and ruffling the gauzy curtains, and Asriel was sitting on one of the lounge chairs in the centre while he ate.

“What _is_ this?” he asked, looking at the bag as he picked up his teacup. It was strong, good tea, but nowhere near as good as his father’s.

“Knitting,” Frisk said simply, hauling needles and skeins of wool out of the canvas, putting them on the footstool by Asriel. They didn’t ever seem to sit down around him, and he didn’t press the matter, but he did wish they wouldn’t always be moving.

“Why knitting?”

“You need something to do, so I asked them,” –again, the absurdly respectful pronoun that they never used for anyone else– “and they suggested knitting. They like to do it.”

“Chara did?” He sat up properly, wiping crumbs off his hands. “They…they do?”

Frisk nodded.

“Oh! Okay, sure, I’d love to try it out! Thank you.” He pushed himself up so he could look closer at it all, but Frisk waved their hands as if to tell him not to bother.

“You can finish eating in peace,” they explained softly. “It’s just that I can’t be around to spend time with you, so I thought it’d be better if you had something to do. You’re also welcome to the books in the library, and anything else that’s in this suite, apart from their bedroom.”

Asriel nodded and thanked them, reminding himself sternly that Frisk’s kindness was the root of this. They were the one who’d thought to ask, who’d seen him so bored the night before and who’d been considerate enough to provide for him even when they had their own jobs to be doing. Chara had nothing to do with it. They hadn’t thought of him: they didn’t even want to see him.

He couldn’t forget the hatred they’d shot him on the cliffs, or on the way back, or in that office with the side of their face flaming red against pallid skin.

So, for a week, he had only books and knitting to keep him occupied. He spent a lot of time on the balcony overlooking the gardens, wondering if it would be too much to ask if he could go down for a walk, just a quick stroll through the herb garden. The flowers caught his interest the most, of course – he couldn’t stop thinking about the colours and shapes and scents – but he’d be satisfied with the herb garden.

He didn’t ask.

In the mornings, he took breakfast with Frisk (they always stood, never ate with him, but they smiled and chatted if he prompted them), and then they would leave with the tray and he was left to go into the small library to read. Sometimes, he tried to do translations or study human history, but he never made much progress. The sea was too rich on the air: he couldn’t concentrate enough for it. It felt too much like the assignments his mother gave him, and that made him think of his mother and whether she’d come back yet. Whether she’d read his letter.

Those thoughts always made him feel cold inside.

He turned to reading: he sought out the most well-worn books, the ones that he could see Chara had read a lot. The ones he picked out, he always liked. It gave him a sickening amount of hope, and that had to be stamped out quickly. Hope was stupid, hope was fickle, and letting himself be intoxicated by it would only lead to more disappointment. But Chara clearly had good taste, so he kept going by their preferences.

By midday, the heat was always oppressive. It was never so bad in his palace. He lay in his room with the shutters closed, or he stayed in the bathing rooms where everything was cool tiles, and he tried to get used to his stupid human body that heated up too quickly. His feet would grow red, flushed with blood; once, he was careless and fell asleep in a patch of sunlight only to wake up horribly light-headed. Frisk always came around noon to bring him drinks (there was no point in food, not with the heat the way it was and with how little he moved around).

In the afternoons, he liked to knit. It was horrendous at first: he could barely work out the instructions that were written in tiny handwriting in the books Frisk had given him. He couldn’t understand how to move his fingers properly now they were so much thinner, not for delicate movement. But he worked at it, and he got better. It was slow-going, with as many lost stitches as proper ones.

In the evenings, Frisk brought food for him and he ate with them much like breakfasts. Each time, they asked him (a little apologetically, almost like they were embarrassed) if he remembered his past, where he needed to go, what he should do. Every night, he told them he didn’t, and they reassured him that that was absolutely fine. He felt terrible for lying. He felt terrible for sitting around doing nothing and wasting away the month the goddess had given him just because he was too proud (too scared) to do anything.

But after that, there were cool baths in the mosaic-ridden bathroom, where he could soak and look up at the murals of the ceiling and wonder what he was doing. If that became too much, he would look at his human body, working out the differences, staring at his hands or legs or torso for so long that the water was unpleasantly tepid when he realised how late it had gotten. After drying himself off with thick, white towels, there was more reading or knitting or whatever he felt like, and then sleep.

Throughout all that time, Frisk was the only other person he saw. So much for learning more about human customs: all he learnt was that servants were nothing like he’d thought. Frisk seemed to enjoy it. They were always working, always smiling whenever they saw him, and though they often had to rush off to other work, they never complained about it. Asriel couldn’t really understand, but he also couldn’t understand why they lavished Chara with so much respect in their conversation, so he supposed there were just things he wasn’t going to get. Culture shock was inevitable, even though he was getting so little taste for the culture in question.

He was losing his mind at the end of ten days.

 

One afternoon, he was hanging over the stone railings of the balcony. It was a stupid place to be: the sun was already searing his back, despite the light clothes he’d been given, but he didn’t feel like moving. He didn’t feel like doing anything much. It was so much easier to just stare out at the gardens and let the sun burn him up into nothing. Or something like that. He didn’t really know.

Occasionally, he’d think about what he would tell his parents and Undyne when he went back. He was going to have to lie, that much was obvious. Maybe he’d just tell them that Chara hadn’t been able to leave. Maybe he could say they were engaged already, so he’d honourably stepped back. Then they’d give him space and not ask him too many questions, he thought. That might work. Anything to avoid admitting how wrong he’d been.

If he thought about it, he knew he should have considered that this might happen. He hadn’t talked to them before deciding all of this, so he really should have realised that it could blow up in his face. In hindsight, he was a little insulted that he _hadn’t_ realised.

But that was done and gone, so where did it leave him? Caged in one corner of a beautiful house, with one good friend who never seemed to come out of their smiling mask long enough to seem _real_ , and nothing to do. Fewer than twenty days to waste away. The festering remains of what he’d thought was love, always in the corner of his mind so he couldn’t even forget about it.

He couldn’t forget them, or stop thinking about them at all.

Perhaps that was why he didn’t notice at first – or perhaps he was just too drowsy to notice right away – but it took him almost ten minutes before he thought to blink and focus on the gardens below him. There was someone walking there, and he knew it was them. It was the first time in more than a week that he’d seen them (the longest time he’d gone without seeing them since the start). His heart clenched uncomfortably, his lungs straining for breath he wasn’t sure how to give them for a second.

There was fear, and there was pride, but an urge to see them came roaring above the rest, and he ran.

He wasn’t even sure where he was going. The house was a labyrinth, and he certainly didn’t remember how he’d first come in. But it shouldn’t have been too difficult: the gardens were right there, always right there, he just had to get down and out of the building.

It took almost half an hour. Sprinting through empty rooms, sliding on tiled floors and scrambling past bewildered servants he could only give apologetic grimaces, he wound his way through what felt like the entire house before he finally found the wide, pillared door that led out into the gardens. For a few minutes, he stood in the shade of the exit to catch his breath and give the sweat a chance to fall and cool. Then he stepped down the sun-warmed steps (his feet were bare, because there was no need for shoes in Chara’s rooms) and walked into the gardens.

They were everything he could have hoped for, but he didn’t take the time to appreciate them. He hurried past beds of pansies, multi-coloured and gleaming like rows of jams; he passed thick clusters of love-in-the-mist and acacia that swept its golden pollen over his clothes; he walked through corridors between herds of hydrangeas and glossy laurel leaves higher than his head. Gravel crunched under his heels, but then there was sand or soft grass and it became easier again. The shade given by orchards of white-blossomed saplings was a short blessing, and then it was into swarms of asphodel and jonquil shining like suns. He listened out for signs of Chara, but all he heard were birds, the buzz of bees rushing past him, the breeze whispering through shrubs and grasses, and the sound of the sea. All he smelt was the thick, heady perfume of a hundred and more flowers.

He didn’t know how long it took him, but he found them eventually. It was at the very edges of the garden, where there was less order to the arrays of flowers around them. Just a few paces out, past the low bushes of coreopsis, he could see the fields of tall grass that led to the sand dunes. But he didn’t pay any attention to that.

Chara was reading, curled up against a beech tree with mauve carnations standing proud all around them. Their clothes were laced up from their ankles to their throat – a skin of embroidery and the illusion of flowing skirts. Sweating as he was, he didn’t understand how they could look so cold.

For a moment – a handful of fast-paced heartbeats – he stood and looked at them, and it was like before. Before he’d made the mistake of speaking to them. Love swelled in him for just an instant, just until they turned a page and looked up to see him. Something very like horror flashed across their face before they shuttered it away as if they were one of the myriad windows of the villa.

And then they smiled stiffly again.

Asriel clenched his fists. A seagull screeched far out above the sea, but it didn’t seem to pierce the bubble they were in. He saw only them; he knew only them, and he wanted to scream. He wanted to ask what in the name of all the stars they thought they were doing. He wanted to shout his frustrations into them, rage at them until they told him what was wrong with him, why they couldn’t even try to like him.

Instead, he found himself saying, “It’s…it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”

“Has it?” they asked politely. They had closed their book, crossed their legs demurely, and that smile was still wide and gleaming. He hated it.

“It has.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Asriel saw a human – a gardener, perhaps – come round the hedge, but they ducked away just as quickly and he didn’t pay them any mind.

Chara slowly got to their feet. Their only visible sign of tension was the white of their knuckles around their book, their veins sticking out. “Have you remembered anything of your past?”

“I haven’t.”

“I see.” They took a step forward, closer to him, before apparently thinking better of it. He kept his eyes on the imprints their leather boots made in the grass, crushing it down. “You said your name was Ree: is that all you remember?”

He was struggling to remember his real name: how was he to know? “Y-yes.”

“No last name?” Their voice was so nauseatingly pleasant and it sounded nothing like it had on the cliffs: it was all sweetness and purity of pitch. “Is it short for anything? Perhaps that might help us find where you came from.”

Was this a test? Was Ree not a normal human name? “It…it is short for something.”

“Oh?”

Asriel couldn’t think, not when their cherry-red eyes were on him, and his frazzled mind reached back for a name, any name he might remember from his books that he could use. “It’s short for…for Ariel.”

Chara looked at him, their mask-like smile waning just a little. Then it was back. “I see. If Ree is your preferred name, we’ll go with that. Keep trying to remember. Good day.”

They swept past him, the lingering scent of carnations following them. That wasn’t right: he had so much more to say, so much more to prove, so much more to ask and they weren’t letting him do any of it. He wanted to hate them, or he wanted to love them, but he didn’t want this, and so he called out after them.

“Chara! That…the first day, you had a red mark on your face, afterwards…”

Chara looked back at him. “I did. I’ll have more if they catch you out here when they specifically told me to keep you out of sight.”

He blanched, his stomach sinking. So he’d been right in thinking that. He hadn’t wanted to be right at all. “Why would you do that for me?”

“Pardon?”

“Why would you go against your parents for me, if that’s what you get for it?” Somehow, he forced the words out in front of their doll-like expression, and it faltered.

“Was I supposed to not help you? You were lost, without memories. What was I supposed to do?” Their voice – lower, rougher – chipped on the last word. They didn’t wait for a reply before walking back into the gardens.

Asriel wished he hadn’t asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not pictured: Asriel discovers what a digestive system is
> 
> I know most of those plants probably wouldn't be blooming in the same soil or at the same time, but let me have my imaginary dream house.


	3. Bloodied and Bruised, I Love You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm renewing my warnings for heavily implied abuse, both emotional and physical, and this chapter (and the next, probably) also features the beginnings of unhealthy possessiveness and the other wonderful things that Asriel brings with him.

“Are you okay?” A soft voice, barely distinguishable from the breeze that blew in from the sea, mixed with salt and seagull’s shouts.

Asriel didn’t look up. He was hanging over the balcony, leaning all his weight on the stone that scraped his human skin and left little white traces. He could see gardeners with wide, straw hats working in the swelter of the afternoon sun. One in particular was watering a sickle-shaped bed of multi-coloured pansies. He’d been watching that gardener for some time. There was a lukewarm cup of sweet, soft juice on the balcony next to his feet, and somewhere inside the main room of Chara’s suite, his knitting lay on a sofa where he’d throw it down maybe an hour ago.

Frisk came up behind him, their bare feet padding softly on the varnished floor, and they waited in the shade of the shuttered doors. They didn’t ask again, which was probably wise because Asriel didn’t feel like answering. He stared out at the gardens for some time, until heat throbbed like a sudden wave through his body and he had to move back where it was cool. Human bodies were useless.

Unable to do much else, he collapsed on the sofa. Frisk watched him from beside a vase of phalaenopsis, waiting for him to say something. He wished they wouldn’t. He wished they’d go away: didn’t they have work to do?

“I’m fine,” he said eventually.

“You don’t look fine.”

“Well, I am.”

They came over to him (they didn’t sit: they wouldn’t sit when he was in the room) and patted his shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”

“It’s not,” he shrugged off their hand, turning on his side. It was childish. It was disgusting. How could he possibly call himself a prince when he was acting like this? Why couldn’t he stop?

There were the sounds of Frisk walking away, and then they were behind the sofa and patting his hair. “It really is.”

This time, he let them pat him. It was nice, nicer than when they’d had to lean over to reach his shoulder. He could almost believe they weren’t keeping themself a set distance away, a calculated number of inches to maintain a relationship Asriel couldn’t understand and certainly didn’t want to. So he closed his eyes and breathed in the faint sandalwood scent of the sofa, and tried not to think at all.

Before Frisk had left to go to their evening work, but after Asriel had begun to think it was time they should, the main doors to the suite opened. It was such a foreign sound that Asriel didn’t even register it at first: he only knew to look up over the back of the sofa because Frisk’s hand left his hair like they’d been burned.

“You,” they greeted, using a second person pronoun so respectful that Asriel hadn’t even read it before; it took him a second to guess what it meant from the inflection. Something about them had changed – maybe their stance, their expression, the air around them – but Asriel barely noticed. Chara was there, closing the door behind them with stiff hands, so he couldn’t notice anything else.

They nodded at Frisk and walked briskly into the library, slamming the door behind them so the frame rattled and the paper crackled. Before he knew what he was doing, Asriel was on his feet and opening the door again, following them in.

They didn’t turn to look at him. Their back was stiff, their shoulder blades like the beginnings of wings under their dress. Without giving any indication they’d heard him come in at all (though they must have), they reached out to take a vase of amaryllis in their hands and they threw it onto the floorboards. The smash made Asriel wince, had him clutching at air where his ears should have been as if to protect them. Chara was shouting. They crouched, kneeling in splintered china, and ripped the flowers apart, screaming words in a language Asriel knew too little of to understand when it was hurled out in fury. They leapt to their feet, grabbed another vase and smashed that too; they punched the wall until the whole room seemed to vibrate, and they roared.

Asriel watched them, wordless.

When he saw blood on the starched white of their wrist-cuffs, he ran to take them by the shoulders and pulled them back to look at him.

They snarled more words he couldn’t understand, but their hands (curled into claws, their fingernails chipped) never touched him. He had the strangest urge to slap them – didn’t that usually work to bring someone back to themself? – but he knew that wasn’t right. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be anything like their parents. He was so calm, it was like he was swimming in a sea of their screams, and because he couldn’t think of anything else, he pulled them to his chest and put his hand behind their head, keeping them there.

He half-expected them to bite his shoulder, but they didn’t. They froze up totally. With a tentative hand, he stroked down their back (from their neck to their waist and no further). They were quiet now: had he done the right thing? Had he ruined it all again?

What had he expected, really?

“You probably shouldn’t keep doing that,” he found himself saying. He couldn’t just not say anything, could he? That wasn’t how this dance worked. Sure, he might not know the words, but he’d just have to improvise. Silence wasn’t an option, because he wasn’t fool enough to think that his presence alone was good enough for them. But he didn’t know what he could say. He didn’t know what he wanted to say.

They didn’t reply: he didn’t even feel their jaw move against his chest. So it was up to him again. “It’s just going to make things worse for you, if they find out.”

He’d read stories about this sort of thing, but that was all. How was he supposed to know what to do? He should have called for Frisk: there was no way Chara wanted him to be the one here with them, but he wanted to be, so he hadn’t called. They weren’t coming in, anyway. So this was his place to be. If they didn’t come in, if Chara didn’t say anything, he could pretend it was okay for him to be here, with them in his arms, and it was like he loved them again.

His chest hurt; he felt like he was choking.

The rich smell of old amaryllis was wafting through the library, above the sharp cut of blood from their hands. It wasn’t much, but it was close to him, and that was enough for him to be able to smell it. That, more than anything else, made him take the sides of their arms and gently move back from them, keeping his eyes on theirs. Their face was fully shuttered up.

For the love of all the stars, it annoyed him! He wanted to scream at them, but there was probably nothing worse that he could do than that. So he spoke instead. He tried to channel his father’s calm.

“I’m sorry for stopping you, but…it’s probably better if you stop now.”

“Better for _whom_?” they hissed.

He changed tactics. “I don’t want to see you hurt anymore.”

“My deepest apologies for inconveniencing you.” Their voice was ice, their eyes were a furnace.

“That’s not what I meant! Sorry, I just…Don’t, please. You need to work out your anger, and that’s fine, but no more. Please. Don’t. It’s just going to prove your parents right.” As if he had any idea why their parents made them act like this.

They shook his hands off and walked to the back of the room, their boots crunching over the shattered vases. Without sparing another look at him, they sat down heavily in the window seat at the far end, nestled in the break between two bookcases, looking out onto the sea. There was no sound from the main room. Asriel wondered briefly if Frisk had gone. He liked them, but he hoped they had. This was for him, all of it, even if he couldn’t rationalise why he wanted it.

Creeping past the china shards, he walked up to the window seat, staying a respectful distance away. Chara had their knees curled up to their chest, cradling their scratched hands. The one good thing about Asriel’s new body was the size: he could sit on the edge of the cushioned seat without touching them.

“What happened?”

“Why should it matter to you?”

“I don’t know. But it does. It does matter to me, a lot. I want to know.”

Their eyes flickered downwards without quite reaching him. “I have ruined my family,” they said in a voice that was far too sweet. “My mother’s enemies slight her, my father’s friends disappoint him, my sisters cannot get their hooks in society. This is my fault.”

Asriel held back his protests because it wasn’t them he needed to protest to.

“I embarrass my mother. I say the wrong things. I don’t smile when she needs me to. I don’t take initiative when she wants me to. It is made very clear to me that these are my shortcomings. I disgust my sisters. It is my fault if they can’t bear to spend time in my company. It is my fault, because I didn’t comfort them the way they wanted, because I wasn’t there when they expected me to be. I bore my father. I don’t speak properly, so he corrects me. I have nothing of interest to say, so he yawns and bids me leave him. It is my fault. When I try to make amends, I do it wrong.”

Now he was closer, in better lighting, Asriel thought he could see faint red scratches across Chara’s cheeks. They hadn’t put their hands anywhere close to their face. He imagined four faceless figures and felt his blood rising with the need to strangle them. It was stupid: he didn’t love Chara. He barely thought he liked them, not _this_ them, not when they were cold and cruel and…when they…weren’t what he wanted…

He stopped himself. If he wanted to help at all, he had to overcome that. Overcome it, or ignore it, or at the very least hide it, because he needed them to feel better.

“You helped me, when you had absolutely no obligation to,” he said in a quiet voice. “I don’t think I ever thanked you properly for that. So thank you. You’ve been really, really good to me. Sorry I didn’t realise sooner.”

This time, their gaze made it to him, but they didn’t say anything. Even though he was sitting in the shade, with their eyes on him he felt far too hot. Like he was burning up.

Maybe a touch hurriedly, he looked out of the window. “I don’t know anything about your situation. Because I haven’t asked, and because I’m not allowed to see your family. That’s okay: I think I might kill them if I ever did see them, anyway.”

“You’d kill them,” they said flatly.

Asriel nodded. “Yeah, probably. I don’t have any experience with that, but I think I would.”

“How do you know you have no experience with it?”

He clawed around for a quick lie. “I, uh, I just feel that way, I think. It’s like…I feel like I’d know if I’d killed someone before. Maybe there’d be muscle memory or something. But I don’t have it, I just…”

“Want to kill my family,” they finished for him.

“Yeah. That.”

They were pinching the bones of their wrists, pulling at the delicate skin with their nails. Almost instinctively, he reached out to take one of their hands in his to stop them. The touch of their skin on his was like footprints in wet sand: he felt that the contact was branded into him. He didn’t let go, and they didn’t pull away, though that seemed more from a lack of will to fight than anything else. They turned their head back to the window, and their hair fell off the chair in response to the movement. It was like a flood down their back, and he couldn’t understand how they weren’t sweating.

A minute or two passed, and the awkwardness got too much for him. “Have you calmed down?”

Their hand slid from his fingers straight back to curl at their neck. “I’m sorry for bothering you.”

“No! No, Chara, that’s not what I meant!” He had turned, and his arm was pressing against the fabric of their skirts. It was gauzy, with a silky, darker layer just underneath. For a second, his eyes felt glued to the way the material fell over their curled-up legs, and then he shook himself out of it and looked into their eyes.

“It’s okay,” they said gently. Sweetly. “I’m fine now. You don’t have to worry.”

“No, you’re _not_ fine! I’m not asking for my sake, I’m asking for yours! I want to know if you’re okay because I want you to be okay, not because I want you to stop being a nuisance to me or something!”

It was different to when he comforted Undyne over the arguments she and her girlfriend had. It was different to when he reassured his friends back home, such as they were. It was different here, because everything, all of him, needed Chara to be okay. Needed them to lean on him until they were. He was fine: he could take everything they could give him, and he wanted to, and he couldn’t for the life of him work out why. He didn’t _like_ them.

He just felt like the ground slipped out from under his feet when their eyes were on him.

They weren’t looking at him now: they were fiddling with the wick of one of their thumbs. “Ree, what do you plan on doing if you never remember?”

“Huh?” The change of subject threw him off. “I…I don’t know. I won’t impose on you too long…”

“No? It’s been a week. I’m not asking you to hurry up, but I wonder what you consider ‘too long’.”

“A month.”

“Sounds arbitrary.”

“It is.”

“Ah.”

His fingernails dug into his palms. “How can I help you? I want to. If leaving you would help, I want to, but I don’t want to leave just for you to hurt yourself.”

“Distract me.”

It was so forthcoming, he wasn’t sure what to do for a second. “Really?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I want to be distracted.”

Asriel blinked, searching for something to say. It came to him easier than he thought it might. “I, uh…I’ve been reading the books here. I read that one, with the group of people who’d been cursed. Sense of Self.” It was the most paged-through book he’d found.

They looked up a little. “Did you like it?”

“I thought the style was bad. It wasn’t well-paced, and the themes were clumsy.” He knew this because his mother had made him think about every book she’d given him since he could read. He knew the things to look for. “But I think I liked it because of the characters. They had life.”

“Well, it is just a children’s book. Which was your favourite character?”

“I liked Sinum the most.” He said this hesitantly, watching them for approval. They made a slight nod, and he went on. “I felt sorry for him. He just fell in love, and he tried his best to make things better, even when everyone was dying around him. He shouldn’t have had to deal with that – he just fell in love with the wrong person.”

“He’d have died anyway.”

“I know, but it would have been better.”

Chara acknowledged this with a short humming sound.

Testing the waters, Asriel said, “I didn’t…I didn’t like them, particularly, but I thought Gieii was probably the best character.”

“You call them ‘them’.”

“Well, I mean…they only had neutral pronouns,” he laughed nervously. “Except for when Jace was speaking about them, but she wasn’t the best person anyway. I thought that didn’t matter. And I know you could say the neutrality was to add mystery to them or something, but I didn’t think that was it.” Even in the language of this human kingdom, which happened to have neutral terms of address, they were typically only used when people just didn’t know. Asriel had always found that a bit weird, but he left it up to the culture shock again.

“Why did you think they were the best?”

“Um…” He had to think about it while watching a small boat out far on the horizon. He couldn’t even tell what colour it was, but it was easier to think while looking at it rather than at Chara’s eyes. “I thought they had the most depth. I know they did terrible things, but still, I can sort of understand them. I mean, they were just doing it for the man they loved, right? They thought he’d love them back. They thought that was the only way they could be happy: if they anticipated what he wanted and made it all perfect for him. They just got it wrong.

“And I mean,” he said, babbling a little, “they weren’t exactly given the best start, right? Nobody wanted to be with them, and everyone left them alone so they had no choice but to latch onto one person. I don’t think it’s bad that they thought he’d be enough. If anything, I think it’s Eito’s fault for not loving them back.”

“Not that he could help not loving them, of course.”

“Well yeah, you can’t choose who you love, but…I mean, Gieii offered everything to him, and he took it and then decided he didn’t want anything more to do with them. I know he was suffering too, but I still think that’s ungrateful.”

“Ungrateful?”

Asriel braved a look at them and found himself caught again. There was something hypnotising about the curve of their cheekbones, the slight scattering of freckles on their nose, the parting of their lips that were almost lighter than their cheeks around the edges, and deep pink in the centre. Like someone had brushed a thumb over them, flushing them with blood.

They’d asked him a question.

“Um, I…I mean, he should have treasured them more. Or he shouldn’t have given them hope. I don’t…I don’t know if that would have stopped them from killing everyone, but I think it might have helped.”

“That’s fair.” They stopped fidgeting with their hands. “Ree, I think I’d like you to leave now.”

For a long few seconds, he tried to find anger or annoyance in their expression, but there was none. So he supposed it was okay. He needed time to think too. Carefully, so as not to jostle them, he got up and turned away, trying not to step on the broken china with his soft human feet, and when he closed the door behind him it was like clouds clearing after a storm.

He could breathe, but it took a few tries to get there.

 

The next morning, he apologised to Frisk.

He’d spent the evening soaking in the cool water of the bath, twisting the skin of his wrists and trying to see what attraction there was in it. Even if he liked to see the tides of colour wash in and out with each pinch, it just hurt. But that calmed him down, and his thoughts settled somewhat until they were more like falling snow and less like a blizzard, and when Frisk came to bring him breakfast in the morning, he apologised to them.

His parents had taught him manners well: he didn’t look at his feet or fidget or make excuses. He just looked them in the eye and said he was sorry, he wouldn’t be so brash and cold with them again. It hadn’t been their fault, and he was in the wrong.

For a few seconds they seemed startled, but then they smiled as usual. Asriel had never actually thought there was anything to be forgiven, but forgiveness wasn’t really the point: he wanted to make sure they didn’t think he was the sort of person who would be thoughtless and then not apologise for it.

“Have things gotten better, then?” they whispered, putting their tray down on the table in the main room. Asriel fiddled with the laces at the front of his shirt before deciding they were a lost cause, and sat down heavily on the sofa.

“I think so. Maybe.”

Frisk nodded happily and stood, melting effortlessly into their invisible state. They always did that. Asriel picked up a fork and started on the soft, white fish laid out on vine leaves in front of him. There were small bowls around it: tea, vegetable soup with a puddle of oil and a sprig of basil on top, thick white yoghurt topped by raspberries and sparkling with sugar crystals.

The shutters were all closed. The main room’s windows and balcony faced the rising sun, which was a blessing in the afternoons, but still would have been annoying if it weren’t for the breeze coming in, rustling the paper doors.

It still didn’t feel real, what he’d seen and said. Chara still felt like a statue, unattainable and unbreakable, and yet now he knew they weren’t. And if they had been cold, if they had hurt him, he had to admit that there were probably reasons for that.

He hadn’t been lying when he’d thanked them for being good to him: he truly felt that, so even if he couldn’t like them for it, he could respect them. And he didn’t have to like them to want to rip them from their family, take them far away from anyone who could hurt them and make them think they were that much of a disaster.

That was normal. That was just what being compassionate was about. It didn’t mean anything.

He wasn’t going to let himself be disappointed like that ever again.

“Frisk,” he said when he was through the fish and soup and halfway into the yoghurt, “can I ask you something?”

They made a little sound of agreement, slipping out of their invisibility.

“Why are you so respectful towards Chara?”

They looked at him like they hadn’t understood a word.

“I mean, with the pronouns and everything, you’re just…doesn’t it feel weird? Putting yourself so much lower than someone else?”

They cocked their head to the side, just enough for their curls to fall free of their shoulders. What light there was shone through their hair, making it glow with gold. Just when he thought they were going to say something, they shrugged and smiled at him cheerfully.

“There’s not really a reason.”

“There has to be a reason!”

“Really?” They sounded genuinely curious. “When you do remember where you came from, can you tell me? I’d be interested to know how you have no idea about any of this.”

“Any of _what_?” He stirred the yoghurt a little too violently, splashing white specks on the tray.

“Servants. Masters. The way of things.”

“Oh, _that_. I know about that. I still think you’re taking it a bit far.”

They shrugged and grinned again, holding up their hands with a helpless air. “Well, that’s how it is!”

“Do you think it makes them happy, to hear you refer to them like that?”

Putting a finger to their lips, they thought about it. “Maybe, maybe not. But I think my feelings count too.”

“Well yeah, of course they do, but…”

“Then it doesn’t matter, right? I’m doing what I want!” They grinned wider, more mischievously.

Asriel didn’t push the topic after that. He finished breakfast, they took the tray away, and he was left to read in the immaculately clean library, or knit in the rising heat of noon. He didn’t knit to make anything: they were just squares of ragged-looking stitches, more often dropped than not, at least for his earlier attempts. It got him more used to his fingers, though, so he kept at it.

He found himself dozing in the afternoon. It was too easy to do with the heat and boredom weighing down on him like pillows. So he slept, letting his eyelids flutter closed, and when he opened them again, things were different.

Chara was staring down at him, for one. That was definitely different.

“Are you awake? Properly?” they asked. Something about their voice felt restrained, and now he could blink way the bleariness of his nap, Asriel noticed that their face seemed tight. They were smiling, so that wasn’t a good sign.

He nodded slowly, reaching up to rub his eyes.

“Good. Let’s go out.”

“Out? Where?”

“There’s a forest close by. We’re going there.” Their voice didn’t bear disobedience, and he wouldn’t have refused even if he’d wanted to. It felt like a dream, if it weren’t for that stiff smile.

Still fighting off yawns, he sat up on the sofa and started to lace up his shirt. It was only slit halfway down his chest, but there were far too many holes and crosses to make and he barely knew how to start.

“Give that here,” they snapped, coming round his side of the sofa to bend down and start lacing it up for him. He froze under their fingers, but they didn’t seem to notice: they worked quickly, clearly used to doing up the rows and rows of lacing on their dress. However quickly it was over, Asriel though he managed to take in every whorl of their hair – tied up tightly into a bun, for once – and every pore of their forehead. It was stupid, it was so stupid, but he couldn’t even blink for fear of taking his eyes off them.

And then they straightened up. “Get your boots on and let’s go. My parents won’t be in a meeting forever.”

That hurried him up. Laces on his boots were so much easier than at his chest, and within minutes they were out of the suite and going down a route Asriel would never be able to remember. It didn’t help that, in what rooms he did recognise, the flowers had been replaced with new, different blooms. It was a maze, and all he could do was hurry after Chara’s long strides.

They left through a back entrance, passing round the sides of the hedged-in garden so Asriel could just see the tops of white blossom-laden trees or fluffy yellow kerria, and then they were walking through grass that went as high as his hips. Thickly-packed sand shifted under his shoes and he had to keep his hands close to his chest to avoid the scraping of each robust blade of grass. Chara, as usual, didn’t show any discomfort whatsoever.

Fifteen minutes or so of silent walking later, they slowed down as the grass faded out into greyer sand that eventually led to shrubs and dirt and the beginnings of a forest. Here, Asriel could finally move up to Chara’s side, and then they were walking together under the scraggly, sparse branches of cork trees. The trunks were darker than Chara’s hair, but halfway or so up each branch that colour turned to lighter grey; the unharvested cork lay on the trees like sleeves. Underneath was all parched earth and scratchy grasses or bushes, but Asriel could see the beginnings of green in the distance. They made their way there leisurely, side by side through the wide gaps between cork trees.

“Have you remembered anything?”

A stab of guilt, but just a small one. “Uh…no, not yet.”

“Alright.”

He couldn’t tell what they were thinking, not when they walked on so confidently with such a straight back, their arms swinging back and forth. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his loose trousers, keeping up with them easily now they weren’t walking as if their life depended on getting out of the house. He didn’t want to think about that. And it might just have been a trick of the light, but he thought he saw bruises at their neck, just above the lace of their collar.

He hooked his thumbs in tighter, clenching his hands together. Conversation. He could do conversation. He’d been trained to do conversation: surely he could manage this.

“Is this somewhere you come a lot?”

“It is. I like the way the light falls.”

Asriel did too. The branches of the cork trees were low and the patchy canopy they stitched together let the light down gently, despite the sun being uncontested by clouds. It was calm, as long as he didn’t think too much.

“Have you been along the cliffs since you found me?”

“Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” _I don’t know how your mind works_. “You might have been scared to pick up another amnesiac.”

“Next time I see one, I’ll turn right around and I won’t let them follow me.”

“Sounds like a plan.” He didn’t know why that should make him happy. Or no, it wasn’t happiness: it was just a deep sense of satisfaction. They wouldn’t pick anyone else up. He was the only one. Even if they ignored him, or avoided him, he was the only one. And he’d seen their rage, their weakness. He’d been the one to see that.

He didn’t like them, but he didn’t want anyone else to see the parts of them they kept under shutters.

Around them, dotted about the trees, there were thistles with purple bursts of flowers sticking out above the stalks. The ground wasn’t quite so arid; there were more grasses rather than just dry twigs on the forest floor. Asriel didn’t know why he was looking down so much. “What do you do all day?”

“I read and study.”

“There’s another library?”

“There are two.” Their voice gave nothing but facts away.

“Do you really spend all day with books?”

“Am I supposed to be doing something else?” A little more brittle. “If so, by all means tell me and I’ll change. I was just under the impression that absolutely nobody wanted me around and I had no choice but to better myself in the hopes that one day someone would.”

Asriel didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t think there was anything to say, not right now.

They waited a few moments – or they couldn’t talk for a few moments: he didn’t look at them to see which it was – and then they said in a smaller voice, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” _Open up to me, only to me, not to anybody else, don’t let anybody else see_. “I don’t mind. But, you know, I want you around. Maybe not all the time, but still.” Risking a look at them, he lifted his head to see their profile, strong and unfaltering and not looking anywhere near him.

“Thank you,” they said eventually.

“Has nobody ever said that to you before?” It wasn’t fair to ask, but he wanted to know.

“Does it matter if they haven’t?”

“Well, yes. People need to know that others want them around. That’s just how relationships work.”

A small noise to indicate that they’d heard him, and then they sped up their pace a little. He wanted to tear their shutters down.

The path grew more difficult: stone-like roots rose from the ground, interspersed with scratching grass and thick nettles, and it was only a matter of time until Chara’s skirts caught on something. With only the faint sound of the sea and some lazy birdcalls around them, they both heard the rip.

Chara swore, richly and imaginatively. Asriel had no idea what to do: from what he could see, the tear wasn’t very big, even if it was in a rather noticeable place. So he just stood stock still, watching as Chara’s anger grew into bellows and curses and, as if something inside them had snapped, they slammed their fist into the trunk of the nearest tree.

Asriel grabbed their hand before they could do it again. “Stop! That’s not going to solve anything!”

Fiery eyes turned on him. “What, you think that if I show up completely unharmed but with my dress ripped, they’re going to believe it was an accident?”

He took a step back. They couldn’t be serious. But even when they pulled, he didn’t let their hand go. Instead, he grabbed the other one so their fingers were clasped tightly inside his, so he could rub circles on the backs of their hands with his thumbs.

“It’s small,” he said in the most soothing voice he could, trying to hide how unsettled he felt in the face of their sudden anger. “No one will notice when you go back in, and then you can find someone to sew it up for you. No one’s going to have to know.”

A long time passed while they looked up into his eyes, their breathing steadily slowing down and their expression moulding itself back into neutrality. He didn’t let go of their hands: now he had them, now he could feel all the bones and ligaments that made them up, he didn’t want to let go at all. It fascinated him.

“You’re right,” they said eventually. “Thank you.”

He had to dig deeper, he had to know. “You wanted to go on a walk for a reason, didn’t you?”

Their eyes narrowed, just a little. “What do you mean?”

“Your…your family upset you, so you wanted to get away. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come back to the rooms before I’d gone to sleep. You wouldn’t have wanted to run into me unless there was a risk of running into someone worse.”

“And yet you’re here with me: don’t you think that means there’s a flaw in your reasoning?” Though the angle must have been straining their arms, they didn’t take their hands back. Their chest was very almost touching his and he tried not to think about it.

“Okay then, so something changed yesterday.” Which meant they had come to him for comfort, for an escape. “But something still happened.”

“Something did happen. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.” Hitching their skirts up to thigh-level, out of the reach of nettles and high enough that he could see the skin above their boots, they walked onwards. He wanted to say something. He wanted to stop them and turn them around so they would talk to him more after that failed attempt at getting them to speak to him, but he felt like sweat was pouring down his temples and he couldn’t think clearly enough to do anything. Breathing deeply, he followed them and tried not to think about their family.

Sundried forest slowly opened into something greener and shadier the further they went inland. Beyond the treeline, Asriel could see bushes of small yellow flowers that could have been cinquefoil or buttercups but just as well might not have been. Inside the woods, there was very little colour aside from the heliotrope and cornflower blue of Chara’s dress, so he latched onto that. That was a normal reaction, he thought.

He didn’t try to talk to them again until they stopped after maybe an hour of walking. They seemed to have calmed down as they looked over the edge of a chillingly steep cliff. Below were scrub-like plants and thin, sandy roads, and far beyond that were rows upon rows of grapes on sloping hills: vineyards, as far as he could see. While he stared at them, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light, Chara began to scrape away debris from the ground with their shoes, and then, when they were satisfied with its general cleanliness, they sat down with their legs hanging over the edge. Asriel sat next to them, cross-legged.

A buzzard circled some way above them and he followed it with his eyes. “Do you come here for the quiet?”

“Not really. I haven’t been to this particular spot before. I come to the forest because it’s here.”

“Good reason.”

“Thanks for approving.” They sighed a little. “I’m sorry for yesterday. I shouldn’t have lost control like that.”

“Yes you should have. If you lost control at all, doesn’t that mean you had to?”

“That’s not how it works,” they shook their head.

“I don’t see why not.”

“And I don’t really see why you can’t understand. I’d dearly like to know what life you came from to see everything so simply.”

Asriel reflected privately that either they needed to start reading more or start talking to more people if they thought the world worked for everyone the way it did for them. It didn’t, or so he hoped, at least. He didn’t want to find out that humans all lived like this, that his stories had been completely wrong, every time. That there were no bonds of love or goodness or compassion, there was just cruelty and self-interest. That couldn’t be true.

“Frisk said the same thing, this morning,” he remarked to the air.

“Did they?”

“Mm. Chara, you know how they refer to you? Why are they so respectful?”

“Implying I don’t deserve it?” Playfulness found its way into their voice and Asriel’s heart skipped at the sound, but then it was gone. “There’s no real reason. I pulled a lot of strings to have them be my personal servant. What happened before or after that, you’ll have to ask them.”

“I did ask them, and they wouldn’t tell me.”

“Then you’re clearly destined to never find out,” they shrugged, leaning a little further over the cliff to watch their feet swing.

“You’re friends with them, aren’t you?”

They looked back at him, still leaning, and he had the urge to hold onto their shoulder, to keep them from falling over the edge. Even though he was sure they’d never fall. “I am. Why?”

“I was just wondering if you had friends at all. You don’t give off that impression, I guess.”

“Is this the part where I say I don’t have friends apart from them and you tell me that that makes sense, given my personality?”

“Uh…no.”

“A pleasant surprise. Do you think you had friends, Ree? Is that in your muscle memory?”

He had the distinct impression they were making fun of him and he couldn’t work out why. He bristled. “Of course I had friends.”

“You’re so certain.”

“Why would I not have had friends? It’d be weirder to say that I’m sure I didn’t.”

They tilted their head back, watching the still-circling buzzard. Their throat was so exposed like that, and in the light he could see the faintest of blue marks as clearly as if they’d been painted there. Anger buzzed through him like he’d been stung. He was going to massacre their parents the first time he saw them, he was going to tear them apart and make them beg for death, he was…

It wasn’t normal to think like that. His mother had told him that countless times, patiently and then urgently. He needed to stop.

“You seem so unsure of how to deal with people,” Chara clarified, “so I thought perhaps you hadn’t had much practice.”

“Unsure?” he spluttered at them.

They looked genuinely confused. “Aren’t you? You stutter over everything – or rather, you did, and maybe today’s just different – and you seem to have difficulty in bringing up subjects properly, or in talking to people effectively. Isn’t that how it is?”

“Are you calling me _tactless?!_ ”

“No!”

Asriel immediately checked his expression, terrified of the fear that had flashed on Chara’s face the moment before they looked away from him. Their hands were digging into the soil, filling the undersides of their nails with dirt.

“I’m sorry,” they mumbled. “I thought you…I’m sorry. I got it wrong. I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s not…” He found himself stretching a hand out to them, but he curled his fingers in at the last second. They didn’t look over, so it was fine. He searched for the right words, the words he thought might bring them back to him. “No, I’m really sorry Chara, that’s not what I meant. I’m not angry at you. I’m just surprised, that’s all. I’m really not angry.”

“I’m sorry,” they said again, and they looked so small against the trees. They weren’t haughty and distanced, they weren’t soft and sweet and obliging, they were just small. He tried to imagine how much smaller they’d be compared to him in his real body, how much taller he’d stand over them.

“I’m not angry,” he also said again, just to drive the point in.

They nodded, but they didn’t smile and somehow that was better than if they had. He wanted to see a real smile, but if they gave him something pre-made and raised in front of them like a shield, he thought he’d be sick.

He didn’t like them. He didn’t. There was no reason for him to like them.

As if they were both falling asleep, calm returned to the two of them. He wished he knew what was going through their head: he couldn’t understand how they flickered so easily between anger and control, between fear and normality. But was that right? Was this normal, or was fear normal for them? Was it always there? A thought touched him like a bee flying into a window: how was he ever going to be able to help them?

Another thought: why did he think he even could?

Why did that matter so much?

After a time, when the breeze was cooler and the buzzard was long gone, Chara asked, “Have you enjoyed any of the other books in the library?”

Taking the change of subject gratefully, he tried to remember his favourites.

 

The sun was low in the sky, spreading everything in long shadows, and Chara had fallen asleep. It was the oddest thing: Asriel had never really thought they were the type of person who slept at all, since they got up so much earlier than him and went to bed later, but they’d dozed off in a lull in the conversation. He was watching them – their parted lips, their eyelashes pressed against their cheeks, their lack of expression to protect themself. Defenceless. He didn’t know why he couldn’t stop looking at them, but he couldn’t.

The afternoon was ending: they had to go back. If their parents would get angry at them for a tiny rip, wouldn’t they be angrier if Chara was late for whatever they might need to be in time for? Asriel didn’t know, but he thought he should wake them up. Except…they didn’t get much sleep. It would be better to leave them as long as they needed. It was in their best interest.

And stars, he didn’t want to wake them up if he didn’t have to.

The idea came to him like a shiver. It was something Undyne had done for him a lot, when he was younger: he had fond memories of waking up slowly to find himself being carried back home by her, looking up to see her grinning and teasing him for falling asleep. It was a nice way to wake up, in someone’s arms.

As gently as he could so that he didn’t wake them, he slipped his arms under their legs and behind their back, and lifted them up. He was surprised his useless human body could do it. Their head tilted to face him, and they were angled to his chest. Everything of his body felt constricted by them and he wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

Somehow, he managed to walk back. Back through the woods, back past the meadow of sunny yellow flowers, back through the cork trees. His arms began to shiver with effort (useless, absolutely useless), sweat coated his back in the choked evening heat, and he walked treacherously slowly, but he was moving.

His eyes barely left their face.

Everything about it was killing him. Their weight was so real in his arms and they were right there, right there, exactly where he’d always wanted them – always? – and he never wanted to let them go. He could smell them, feel them, and everything was so _real_. This was _happening_. How many times had he imagined this? How many times had he dreamed of it? It was all happening, really, truly. Like his first week had never happened. Like their first meeting had never been.

This was perfect, and this was waves washing over the shore: resentment, anger, disappointment melting away into nothingness, but what they left behind was anything but a blank slate. Asriel’s pulse started throbbing in his neck, or maybe it had always been racing, and he tried to push every unwelcome thought out of his mind as they sprung up. It was pointless. He’d had too many months to imagine all of them in detail and they were all rushing back to him.

But Chara was real now. With bruises and marks and rages and claws and a mask Asriel wanted to rip down but knew he couldn’t, and they were _real_.

Of course he didn’t like them. He’d never just liked them: it had been love from the start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Top tips: if you ever get stumped for character conversations, just have them talk about your own thinly-veiled OCs.
> 
> Also, notice that the setting is extremely dry and Asriel is phenomenally thirsty. That's what we in the business call pathetic fallacy (this wasn't actually on purpose).


	4. Delusions of Being Yours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was supposed to be just one more chapter but it got to 13K and I realised it wasn't going to work, so here.   
> 'Cover page' can be found [here](http://eristastic.tumblr.com/post/144880234182/cover-page-for-my-fic-moonflowers-and-agave). (I've been doing these for most of the fairy tales and the descriptions have been updated with links)
> 
> Serious warnings for dysphoria, misgendering, abuse (never shown 'on-screen'), and we're moving into co-dependence territory as well. 
> 
> Because it's now relevant: moonflowers - dreaming of love, agave - ‘I remain well disposed to you despite your knavery’

The air was stifling and Asriel couldn’t keep his eyes open. Bees and flies battered the shutters trying to get in or out, occasionally buzzing over him, but there were so many that he couldn’t be bothered to help them. It was every creature for themself in this – what had to be the hottest day of the year.

It wasn’t even high summer, but Asriel was going to look past that for his sanity’s sake.

His stupid human skin felt sticky, and the pillows underneath him were just damp enough to be unpleasant when he turned onto his side for a change of pace. Knitting was out of the question: he was not putting wool anywhere near his hands (even fine wool, the soft angora that he’d found lying on the table one morning, waiting for him). Reading might be nice, he supposed, if it didn’t involve going into the library (which faced the sun and was becoming something of a sauna). So he draped himself over the sofa and thought.

It wasn’t the drag that it had been before. Not the burn of shame and plans to save face, or to leave a hated house. Just the fluttering of something in his chest and the firm, comforting knowledge that this was love. ‘Again’, or perhaps it always had been and it had just taken him time to realise. He didn’t know or care. He replayed Chara’s smiles over the insides of his eyelids: the deluge of fake, stiff ones, and the sprinkling of real ones amongst those, like spun gold among straw. It was too hot, but he brought his hands to cover his mouth, grinning helplessly at every memory of them.

A few days had passed since the afternoon in the cork forest, and they’d been speaking to him regularly ever since. It was something he looked forward to with embarrassing eagerness: it was like the very idea of talking to them lit up something in his chest and all he could concentrate on was that, was them, was sharing words with them and having them – maybe, if it was a good day – smile for him. It was enough to make him forget everything else, like the world was a drab splash of grey and they were colour itself.

But he was never going to _say_ that. They’d never let him hear the end of it if he did, and he….he couldn’t tell them anyway.

It was something he hadn’t bothered to be worried about at the start, because he hadn’t liked them so there was no risk in it. But the moon goddess had clearly told him that he couldn’t speak of his love, at all, to anyone, or else he’d lose his human body, and that was becoming a sticking point for him. It wasn’t that he thought he’d ever have the courage to confess how much he loved them, how much he wanted to hold them and never let them go, how much his weak human heart sped up around them (as if his own heart wouldn’t do that too), how much they meant to him, it was only…He thought he’d like the freedom to be able to say it. Even if they laughed at him, he wanted to be able to tell them. He wanted to be totally honest.

It was a small thorn in his side, but he was managing to ignore it pretty successfully. Just about as successfully as his ongoing projects of not thinking about his mother’s reaction when he went home, or the sheer amount of work he’d have to do to make it up to her. But that was alright, he thought. He was already making plans to take Chara back with him. It was obvious they couldn’t stay in this house, not with parents who hurt them and nobody who loved them except Frisk and that was a whole new problem that Asriel would turn his mind to at some other time.

For this lazy afternoon, he would soak in heat – too listless to even fan himself – and think of Chara.

It therefore came as something of a surprise when the door opened and he looked over to see Chara come in. Somehow they were still in a clinging bodice and layers of skirts, but it was something of a relief to see that their sleeves were loose and slit open and that their hair was tied up. Asriel wondered if it wasn’t something that humans just got better at as their life progressed, and he’d missed out on it so he was stuck feeling like a baked slug.

Baked slugs were not on his mind for long: Chara came to sit on the chair next to his sofa (they sat down heavily, the chair legs squeaking against the floor) and looked at him, and he was caught.

As if the heat wasn’t oppressive enough, blood rushed to his cheeks when they smiled briefly at him. Human bodies were the worst.

“You seem to be melting, Ree,” they said conversationally.

“I think I’d prefer if that were true, actually.” He almost said something casual like ‘I don’t know how you people put up with it’, but of course he couldn’t. Of course.

“Well, I’m sure I could arrange it somehow or other.” Their voice sounded a touch brittle, though they were usually so good at hiding that sort of thing. Asriel gave them a moment to breathe and collect themself, and he took the time to look at them closer. They were carrying a small bag, or not a bag: Asriel saw it was something bundled in cloth, and they unwrapped it, putting the contents on the table. They didn’t look at him when they spoke next, but he was staring at the table for most of it so he barely noticed.

“I thought…” they swallowed, starting again more briskly. “I thought you might like this. Of course, I don’t know: I don’t know if you like flowers at all, but I thought you might, and these…reminded me of you, a little, so here.”

A number of moonflowers were on the table, the dusty whiteness of their bright petals reflecting off the varnish, just enough to make them look as if they were glowing. Just looking at them made Asriel feel cooler, but he was speechless, thoughtless with the idea that Chara had brought them for him. They’d been reminded of him. They’d thought of him while he wasn’t there.

“It’s your hair,” they clarified shortly. “It’s the same kind of silvery white.”

Asriel nodded, gulping, his face flushed, and he smiled at them so uncontrollably that he thought he might cry. “Thank you.”

“Why are you tearing up?” they spluttered, a laugh on their lips. It was the kind of mocking laugh they did sometimes to keep from showing a different, more vulnerable emotion, so he didn’t mind at all.

“I, uh…they remind me of something. I don’t really know what, but…” he turned his eyes back to the flowers and picked one up, cradling it in his spindly human fingers. “They’re kind of nostalgic.”

And they were, that was the thing. How many times had he passed the bushes of moonflowers back home, or gazed at them under the moonlight? They grew like grass at the palace. He hadn’t seen them since he’d left, and he hadn’t realised the memories they – their shape, their scent – would bring up in him.

Chara looked uncomfortable, but a vaguely pleased sort of uncomfortable. The face of someone who’s satisfied with what they’ve done but would rather not be around for the consequences. Asriel rubbed his arm over his eyes and grinned at them.

“Thanks! I’m really pleased you’d do this for me. I like them a lot.” Honesty tasted sweet in his mouth, even if he couldn’t add on ‘-and I like you a lot, too’ or something else that would make Chara hit or laugh at him. As it was, they smiled back (a small smile that barely turned up the corners of their lips) and nodded, as if a transaction had been completed.

“I need to go now. But I’m glad you like them. I’ll bring you more flowers if you’d like that.”

Asriel sat up very straight, nodding frantically. “I would! I, uh, I mean, I really would. I’d like that a lot. Please.”

“Good.” They nodded again, their bun bobbing a bit (a small lock of hair had come undone and was brushing the side of their neck – it drew his eye). He watched them until they left, closing the main doors carefully behind them and sending a brief breeze through the room, and then they were gone and Asriel slumped back against the sofa, pulling his knees to chest and smiling so hard he had to shove a pillow in his face to stop.

 

Chara didn’t come to see him that evening, nor did they come the next afternoon, and that gave Asriel far too much time to let his mind wander. He’d at least had the foresight to fish some books out of the library before it became a furnace, and he whittled away the afternoon reading and pretending that there wasn’t an omnipresent spark of hope inside him, volatile and waiting for Chara to set it off by open the door.

He wanted to _do_ something, he thought. How was he supposed to just keep quiet about how he felt? How could anyone do that? It was madness, really. He loved them and he wanted them to know it, it was really all so simple.

So he thought on the problem and decided he’d ask Frisk. If he was totally honest with himself, he didn’t really need the advice. It was more a way to express his feelings, a way to get the attention he thought those emotions deserved because he needed them to be acknowledged, in some way. Once the month was up, he would deal with things as they came, but in the meantime he was going to concentrate on somehow showing Chara how he felt and hopefully sparking the same in them.

Frisk came in at the usual time with the usual tray and he greeted them in the usual way, sitting down and ignoring the fact that they didn’t. Considerately, they didn’t go into their invisible manner, but they didn’t offer any topics of conversation. He was used to this. It was how they were.

No, that wasn’t right: it was how they presented themself. It seemed absurd to suggest that that was how they actually _were_.

Dipping a strip of grilled flatbread in thick, black tapenade, he looked at them. “Um…can I ask you something?”

They nodded vigorously.

He played the words he’d chosen over again in his head before saying them, hesitantly. “Let’s pretend that you have feelings you can’t tell anyone, for some reason, but you want to get them across anyway. How would you go about it?” He congratulated himself on his cunning loophole, only realising after he’d said it and seen the grin grow on Frisk’s face that he could have been a little more subtle.

“Hmm,” they hummed in an exaggerated fashion, putting a finger to their chin. “I’d show it in actions, probably. So…let’s pretend the feelings are romantic. And let’s pretend you couldn’t say them because you were too embarrassed. I think it would be a good idea to start showing the other person by doing things for them. Or you could try getting closer to them! Physically. Physically get closer to them.” They waved a hand out dramatically, as if painting a scene. “When the lights are low and the mood is right, snuggle up to them and put your arm around them and they’ll turn their face up to you and then you smooch them and-”

“Stop! That’s enough, I get it! Thank you!” The flatbread was drowned in the tapenade jar and Asriel was covering his face with his hands, squeaking, and _gosh_ , why wouldn’t his stupid human circulatory system do its job properly and _not_ send all his blood to his face?

“Really? I can go into more detail if you-”

“I do _not_ want, thank you, I’ll be fine, I get the idea.” He flapped his hands in a futile attempt to cool down his face, sitting up straighter. His fingers were still too long and thin and smooth, so apparently he hadn’t broken any of the goddess’ stipulations. “What about you?” he asked petulantly. “You don’t do that, do you? All that snuggling stuff.”

They blinked at him. “Well, I mean, my feelings aren’t quite the same as yours, I’d bet. Should I, ah, go over how different kinds of caring about people work? I can do that.”

“I’d really prefer it if you didn’t.” He tried to rescue the bread, decided it was a lost cause (and that he didn’t really like tapenade anyway – it looked like crushed beetles and that reminded him of snails and home), and turned to the sliced peaches. “So how come you’re the only person I see around here apart from them, anyway?”

“I’m the only servant specifically for them!” they said proudly, puffing out their chest like a small bird in cold weather. “Everyone else works around the house generally and only I work here. Usually I’d clean it a lot more thoroughly and such, but since you’re here I’ve been taking it slower and mostly working around the house with the others.”

“Oh,” Asriel said in an admonished sort of way. “Uh, sorry. I really don’t mind if you clean in here, though! So if you need to, you’re welcome…”

“No, it’s alright. You being in here keeps a lot of the dust out anyway, and I like being with the others. It’s more fun that way.”

“So you have friends?”

They tilted their head in a puzzled way. “Well yeah, of course I do. I’m a paragon of popularity, can’t you tell?”

“With that attitude, I guess you’d have to be,” Asriel muttered, chewing on a slice of peach. “If you don’t mind me asking, where were you born?”

“Just around the forest from here, down in Viekos. This household’s the biggest for miles around, and it takes in a lot of children from the local orphanages, educating them a bit more and teaching them service and stuff. It’s a pretty good system, I think. If not, I’d just be stuck in the cork or wine trade like everyone else, and I guess that could be fun, but I’m not good with the heat. Working inside is nicer.”

Asriel nodded in mild encouragement to keep them speaking. “So most of the servants are from nearby?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” They began to rock back and forth on their heels for something to do. “That’s just how it works around here. Usually, if you’re employed into one of the big families, it means you’re set for life, too. They’re very good to their lifelong servants.”

_But not to their children_ , Asriel didn’t say because it seemed a bit waspish. Instead, he asked, “So everyone speaks this dialect, right?”

“Or thereabouts.”

He made a noise of interest, settling back against the pillows. “Next time you have a free moment, do you think you could explain some idioms to me? I keep coming across them in books and I’m never quite sure what to make of them, because of course there isn’t a dictionary for that sort of thing around here.”

“There probably would be in the main library,” they said, clearing the plates onto the tray and straightening up to leave. “I can find you one if you’d like, but I can also explain some to you tomorrow.”

“I’d like that,” he said with a final smile at them before they left him to the sounds of seagulls circling outside.

There wasn’t much to do: there was never much to do. He went to sit on the balcony, fitting his legs through the gaps between the tiny pillars holding up the balustrade, but that wasn’t exactly mentally challenging. He had the dull thought that he ought to be doing something. He ought to be productive. Having so much free time was utterly foreign to him: how were you supposed to manage it? If he were back home, he would have had essays and projects and meetings to do under the eyes of his parents; he would have had training and a whole host of people to go and see if he felt like talking. It was like he was living in a swamp of ‘should be doing something’ and ‘too hot to do anything’ with only Chara to really break it up and get him interested. It was a little concerning.

More concerning, perhaps, was the fact that he didn’t think he minded much. When they were there, he didn’t mind at all because his head was full of them.

The moonflowers were in the bathroom and he went there, to cup them in his hands and smell them again. The scent was too faint with his human nose – plucked and already withering, they should have been a lot more pungent – so he took the excuse to smell them as much as he could before they died. Chara would bring him more. They’d bring him more flowers of every type, and maybe he’d be able to go out in the garden with them. He wanted a chance to admire it properly before he left, and he wanted to do it with them.

He had to close his eyes and smother his face in wide, smooth petals when he started to think about how they’d look under the blossoms, how beautiful they’d look with tiny white petals in the deep red-brown of their hair.

After that, with the evening still stretching out in front of him, he bathed for far too long. It was still weird to him that human skin wrinkled up in water. There didn’t seem any point to it. It just made his hands feel oddly dried out. He hummed a tuneless song while getting dressed in loose evening wear – not that he really had different outfits for different times of day, he just liked pretending he did so he could kill time getting changed – and went back to the main room to watch the moths come out.

Perhaps half an hour after the sun had gone down and he’d lit the lamps, the main doors opened. Like a dog perking up its ears, he dropped his book on his lap and looked up. Chara looked back, not quite smiling, but close to it.

“My parents are out with my sisters tonight. I want to show you something.”

As a wave comes into shore, he ran to be by their side as they led the way out.

The house was still a maze to him and he couldn’t do much more than follow them, but that was all he wanted to do anyway. Trotting to keep pace with their confidence, he nodded politely at any servants they passed, and vaguely noticed that they were going upwards. This became a lot more obvious when they passed from a drawing room (open on three sides) into a curtained hall that led to a huge set of stairs. Chara took these two at a time and Asriel hopped up them as best he could. They were both out of breath before they reached the top, but when they did, there was only a small landing and a door, and Chara opened this to let him through first.

Asriel walked out onto the roof and felt his breath catch in his throat.

The sea had always been his horizon, but now it was _everything_ : a world he’d missed, cooped up in a cage of shutters and paper doors. The sliver of moon glinted off tiny breakers, and then there was silvery sand and the rivers of dune grass. The roof was flat and all in white with a low border around the edge, carved with shapes he couldn’t quite make out in the low light. There were more such roofs: two to the sides and slightly behind, and then three more in symmetry with the first three, all circling a main courtyard with a fountain and other things he couldn’t see properly.

He felt drawn to the edge closest to the sea, and he only stopped when his hips were up against the stone border. Vines, he realised: the carvings were of vines.

The wind whipped his hair back as he turned to smile hopelessly at Chara. “This is amazing! I’ve never seen anything like it!” And he hadn’t, he really hadn’t. Even in his palace, there were always the cliffs first. The view was never just laid out for him like this.

“You remember that much?” they asked, smiling back softly and leaning their elbows on the flat top of the border.

“It _feels_ that way.”

“Oh, your feelings again? As long as you’re certain, then.” Their smile held for a second longer before slipping, and then they were just looking out to sea like a figure in a painting. The moonlight hid the flaws of their skin and lit up their eyes; their back was gently curved under layers of aquamarine silk. It was almost more than Asriel could bear and he had to turn away and mirror their pose before he got carried away with himself.

He let a silence build up between them until it was like the caramel cage he’d been presented with a few nights back: fragile to the slightest tap, but just enough to separate the world from them. The two of them. He shuffled up until their shoulders were touching.

“I don’t suppose I could talk to you about something stupid?” they asked, as if they were speaking to the sea itself.

“Of course you can.” He felt strangely hushed, even though his heart was pounding and he could feel heat rushing to his cheeks – again, of all places! – just from being so close to them. But that wasn’t what they needed from him. He kept his smile neutral and tried to look like someone people might conceivably want to confide in.

They didn’t turn to appreciate it, but that was probably for the best. Instead, they opened their mouth, closed it, and started again after a few moments. “I’m not sure I’m happy here. Or rather, I knew that before, but now I think I might not ever be happy here. It’s not a very good thought: every time I think it, my fingers start itching with the need to break something.” They exhaled a tiny little breath, barely a sigh at all. “And I think it might get better if I just try harder. That’s logical, isn’t it? So I keep trying because if I try harder and harder to be good and acceptable, then they might not find me deficient anymore. But I’m starting to think I’ve tried as hard as I can. There’s nothing left in me to try. It’s like there’s a wall in between what they want me to be and what I am, and I just cannot see the way to get across, even though I’ve been at this for years. It’s like…if I could just break it down, they’d see how much effort I’ve put into it all, and I might be happy. But I can’t break it down. And they don’t even know it’s there.”

Asriel felt like his tongue had turned into paste. Chara didn’t notice, because there was no way they could have, and they kept talking.

“I’ve been thinking, recently, about that book. Mostly about Gieii. I keep thinking about how hard they tried. But they were trying in completely the wrong direction, weren’t they? And they never knew. That was just how their mind worked: they never realised that everyone else wanted them to do something completely different, that everyone knew there was something fundamentally wrong with them.”

They trailed off, their words like wisps of fog in the clear night air. It was barely nearing cool, but Asriel shivered anyway. The jolt of energy got his mouth working again.

“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with you,” he said, looking down at the white lichen growing on the stone under his fingers.

Chara cocked their head. “No, I said there was something fundamentally wrong with Gieii, weren’t you listening?”

“It was an analogy!” he protested, and then, a little more worried, “Wasn’t it?”

They kept the confused expression for a second more, and then flicked him on the forehead. “Of course it was.”

“Well, good!” Asriel huffed, his pride more than a little battered. “And anyway, even if there was something fundamentally wrong with you, all Gieii needed was Eito to actually care about them, right? They’d have been fine then: he could have tempered them and taught them.”

“Implying they needed taming.”

“ _Tempering_ , not taming. Now who’s not listening?” But it was a feeble excuse: something to say to pretend his heart wasn’t thundering in his ears at the thought, at the very _idea_ …

“Tempering, then. Heating to a very specific temperature before using so they come out all smooth and shiny.”

“What? No, not like chocolate.”

“It could be like chocolate.”

“Yeah, okay, potentially it could, but that’s really not what I meant.”

“Isn’t it? Oh well.”

That time – finally – he caught onto the lightness of their tone, the curl to their lips, the facetiousness written into their every word, and he realised they were running away from what they’d said. They were shuttering up.

“Anyway,” he said hurriedly, standing up a bit straighter and slamming his hands down on the stonework, “I don’t think it matters if you never find your way over the wall. It’s fine if you don’t: they’re in the wrong for not even trying to understand you, too. Don’t look at me like that! Proper families are supposed to _try_ and understand! You’re supposed to talk it over and work it out together and share all your good and bad times: that’s what family _is_. I don’t even know what I’d do if my parents were like yours!”

Their eyes were on him like a predator’s.

“Ah, I mean…If they turned out to be like yours. When I remember them. I wouldn’t even accept them. That’s not what parents are supposed to be. I know…I heard from Frisk that apparently your family’s good to the servants. And it’s…it’s still weird to me that servants even exist, so it seems natural that you’d be good to people doing everything for you, but…I still don’t think that your parents count as good people. Not if they do what they do to you.”

“Does merely being bad people mean you should kill them?” Chara asked thoughtfully.

“What?”

“You said, before, that-”

“ _Oh_. Oh, yeah, I remember. But that wasn’t because I thought they were bad people. I mean, I think they are bad people, but…I meant that I’d kill them because of how they treat you. Nothing else but that.”

“Oh.”

Asriel backed away from the barrier a little. Perhaps he’d said the wrong thing: he couldn’t tell. It was impossible to tell, with them. He wanted to tear that impossibility into a thousand tiny petals and watch them fly away in the wind.

“There’s going to be a dance here, in two nights,” Chara said pleasantly.

“I-is there?”

“Yes. I’m going to be pulled into preparations for that. Dress fittings and last-minute dance practice. That sort of thing. So I won’t be able to come and see you as much.”

“That’s a shame.” He tried not to think about the clothes they’d wear, how lovely they’d look.

“I may come and see you afterwards. I don’t do well with dances.”

Asriel tried to decode this but was thrown off almost immediately when they turned around, leaning on their elbows and fixing him in place as a pin would to a butterfly’s body.

“Do you think you know how to dance?” they asked lightly. “It might be one of your muscle memory things.”

Asriel did know how to dance, but he didn’t have enough faith in his knowledge of his human body’s centre of gravity to try the same movements in it. So he shrugged. “I…I’m not sure. I could probably learn, either way.”

“You probably could. We should dance, sometime.”

_Why not now?_ , he wanted to ask, but his mouth was too dry.

They’d collected themself and they weren’t shuttered, exactly, but they weren’t open either. Half-shuttered. What a useful metaphor, he thought. In this half-shuttered state, they could smile softly and speak to him properly, but they wouldn’t show discomfort and they wouldn’t show weakness. Those were things that broke a person, so they wouldn’t show them.

The two of them lapsed into a companionable silence, but Asriel’s mind was left buzzing.

 

On the night of the ball, Asriel stayed half an hour longer than usual in the bath. He could hear people coming in: the house might be almost the same size as the main building of his home, but the guests were so many that they filled it all and he could close his eyes and almost imagine being among them. Even in the tiled prison of the bathroom, the muffled, senseless voices carried through to his ears. The music was a low strum in the background, too far away to ever pick out a tune.

With his fingers and toes thoroughly wrinkled and dried, he climbed out of the bath and stood, dripping, staring down at himself. Everything was wrong. He didn’t feel like he could reconcile the idea of this body and himself; it was like it was separated from him, a vessel he stood in but wasn’t part of. The feeling came over him sometimes, especially after bathing. Distantly, he shook a foot out. It obeyed him well enough, sending a few drops of water onto the tiles. He’d loved his body, at the start. Now it just felt wrong. Not him. Not as perfect as he’d thought originally.

Forcing himself through movements that didn’t quite feel real, he dried off and got dressed, walking out into the main room with the tips of his hair still damp. It was eerily dark: he’d forgotten to light the lamps after dinner, after Frisk had had to hurry away. So he did that and then he sat down on the sofa and looked out to the balcony, as he did so often. The gardens were lit up and he could see guests milling around in them. The grounds surrounding the house were bathed in a soft glow from inside, and now he could hear the tinkling of glasses, the hum of stringed instruments and the low thrum of percussion. Still somewhat detached from his body, he looked up at the ceiling and tried to imagine what Chara would look like dancing. If they liked to. They had said they weren’t good with dances, but if it was just the two of them then it would be fine, wouldn’t it?

He stared until his eyes stung and he remembered he had to blink, and then he changed positions and considered going to sleep. It wasn’t normal to sleep on the sofa when your bed was fifteen seconds away, at most, but he wondered if he shouldn’t do it anyway. Shake things up a bit. And Chara had said they’d come to find him. So he should stay awake, actually. He should stay awake for them. Decided, he sat up properly and picked up his knitting.

His heart wasn’t really into it, but he knitted squares anyway. The clicking of the needles was nice: it was a sound that belonged to him, not like the dull noise from below. They were dancing now: he could hear laughter and the rhythmic thumping of feet on floors. It sounded just like any ball he’d ever been to before, except monster balls were much more disorganised. They had to be, with so many different bodies to accommodate for. Music was a guideline, and there weren’t really fixed dances (Asriel had learnt human dances because that seemed the diplomatic thing, and because he wanted to dance like the people in his books). Usually there was a rhythm and people danced in groups, in circles, just for the feeling of being with someone in harmony. Asriel liked that. He’d had a lot of fun dancing with Undyne and her friends (who were, by extension, his friends) at his sixteenth birthday celebrations. As with most things, Undyne had wiped the floor with all of them (literally, in one case), but that had just been more fun. Once he’d got tired, he’d stood at the side-lines and chatted with her girlfriend about things he didn’t really understand but which Alphys had been happy to chatter on about for hours.

That was what parties were supposed to be, not this. Not Chara’s stiff smile and ‘ _I don’t do well with dances_ ’.

That was what families and friends were supposed to be. Not this.

Asriel threw his head back until his throat hurt, and he wondered how much he’d have to do to convince Chara to come back home with him. If it was just that, he thought he’d be able to, but with his disguise and the prospect of going to a totally different kingdom…he didn’t know. Even they probably wouldn’t be sanguine about going to live surrounded by monsters.

Over the course of several hours, he dozed and did very little. He didn’t know how many times he fell asleep, but he was woken up definitively by the door slamming open. His mouth was already curving in a smile when he turned to look at them, and then he saw them properly.

They were beautiful, because they always were, but – looking past the dress and the jewellery and the expertly-curled hair and the thin lines of black above their eyes – he could see they were furious. Their face was twisting, their teeth clenched together and their eyes were wide, wide red. They didn’t even appear to see him: they went straight for their room, their back hunched up, and Asriel sprinted after them because he knew how that ended and his hands were shaking at the thought.

The door wasn’t even fully open before they shrieked – a hideous sound, raked from the depths of their throat – and ran for the mirror that hung in one corner of the room, beside a great many clothes chests and wardrobes. Asriel couldn’t get a word out before they punched it and the glass shattered. They were roaring, screeching, tearing the mirror from the wall until it ripped away, throwing it on the ground and picking up a shard of glass.

“Stop!” Asriel managed to scream, running to them, but it was their dress they cut, and he faltered. He didn’t know what to do: what could he do? He needed to calm down and help them, he needed to be strong and help them, he needed to be what they needed.

He didn’t know what that was.

They were kneeling, slicing the gauzy outer layer and ripping the satin inside, tearing it all to shreds around their shaking knees. There were tears falling down their cheeks, spotting the fabric with darker colour, but their smile never wavered. Even when the screams broke into painful gasps, gulping sobs, they smiled.

Asriel thought about what his parents would do. Keeping as steady as he could, he walked towards Chara and crouched down beside them, carefully taking the glass from their hand. There were thin lines of red where they’d cut themself, and he covered these with his own palms, holding their hands in his like he’d held the moonflowers. They didn’t look at him, and in some way it was better like that.

He wanted to hug them. Wrap them in his weak human arms and give them a place to cry because it was _okay_. Whatever had upset them was okay when he was there: he wouldn’t let anyone touch them. He was going to protect them perfectly, and he knew that that wasn’t just the need to be a knight. It was because it was them. But he didn’t put his arms around them, because he could see how they shivered and how their hands fussed even while he held them with their every finger caught between his.

They stayed like that for a long time, and Asriel’s legs began to numb. It was strange: he could still hear the party downstairs, but every sound was like another turn on a wind-up key, winding him tighter and tighter and more irritated. He wanted to hurt them. He wanted to go down and rip them all apart for doing this to Chara. He hadn’t been there and he was going to put it all to rights.

And somehow he knew he’d never be able to kill. But the thought was there, and the thought was enough: he’d always had those thoughts, as far back as he could remember. His mother’s patient talks with him had never been able to get rid of them. So he was useless, driven only by a rage he couldn’t understand and which would never see him through to the end of what he knew he needed to do. For them.

Chara’s tears had long since stopped. They weren’t smiling anymore. In the darkness of their room, lit up only by what moonlight could make its way in strips through the shuttered windows, Asriel could barely see their face, but he knew they weren’t smiling.

“I’m sorry,” they whispered croakily. It distressed him more than he wanted to say.

“Please don’t be.”

Gently putting their hands down on their thighs (covered in frayed strips of purple cloth), he sat down cross-legged, stretching his legs a little to get the blood flowing again. Trying not to do anything that might bother or spook them, he waited for them to be ready, and waited for his own heart to calm down. It was fine, it was going to be fine: he was a prince and he could make it fine for them.

“I _hate_ this,” they said eventually, the words catching and breaking hoarsely. “I hate it, all of it, I hate it so much I can’t control myself and then shit like this happens. I wouldn’t even fucking care about the dresses or fucking anything, but when I wear them they look at me and think they know exactly what they’re seeing and they _don’t_. And they keep using these words like they’re knives, and they keep telling me I’m confused and telling me I don’t know myself and it gets _so fucking hard_ to live with yourself when literally fucking everyone in this entire fucking country tells you that you’re unnatural and not worth their care.”

They were squeezing their hands into fists; blood beaded out of the cracks between their fingers. Asriel touched their knuckles gently, stroking the skin until they relented and opened their hands so he could take them again.

Neither of them said anything. It took too long for Asriel to realise that Chara wasn’t going to elaborate.

“I…” he started weakly. “I don’t really understand. I don’t understand how there’s anything wrong with you.”

“Don’t play dumb!” they shouted, glaring at him with an intensity that left his chest light and fluttery. “Frisk told me you refer to me neutrally so I know you get it, I _know_ you do!”

“But I thought that’s what you are?”

“ _It is!_ ”

“Then…wh-…” It occurred to him like ice water down his spine. “Do other people not know?”

“My family _know_ ,” they spat. “But they don’t believe me.”

Asriel let that sink in slowly. He tried to remember what he’d seen of the other servants’ clothes, what he knew from stories, the way Chara had commented on how he referred to Gieii, and he put it together.

“You hate how you look,” he said slowly, like a child put on the spot for an answer they couldn’t give.

“ _Yes_! Yes, I fucking hate it! I hate it all!” They turned their head to look at him and a strip of light hit their face. He could see the smudges of black all around their eyes, the slight sheen of sweat, and the desperation that radiated off them, brighter than daylight.

“Then let’s change it,” he heard himself say.

“Are you an idiot? I can’t! My parents would…” they bit their lip.

“Change it. I think you’re beautiful and I’ll think you’re beautiful no matter what, and you shouldn’t settle for less than that.” He faltered, uncertain of what he was saying – how could _he_ tell _them_ anything? – but he knew he had to finish this honestly. “You need to be comfortable. Isn’t that the minimum for living? Being comfortable in your own body?”

They stared at him for so long he was sure he’d crumble, and then their face split into a smile that looked like it would be more comfortable never having existed. “You’re the strangest person I’ve ever met, do you know that, Ree?”

Nervously, he asked, “Do you mind?”

“No. Do you have any idea what they’re going to do to me if I do anything that can’t be hidden?”

“No,” he shook his head. “But change it anyway. If…if you want to, change it.” There was a feverish excitement in him that he loathed: acting out, doing what _they_ wanted, breaking the rules and living for themself. But it was more than that, because it was also the idea that they would be rejected by the people they didn’t need. And then there would be him, waiting.

It was appalling, and yet he couldn’t pretend he didn’t want them all to himself.

“Cut my hair,” they said, very calmly.

Asriel nodded and picked up one of the bigger shards of glass, holding it gingerly in one hand as he got up and moved to kneel behind them.

“How short?”

“As short as you can get it.”

He hesitated. “Why not just as short as mine?”

“I thought you said you’d think I was beautiful no matter what,” they said in a tight voice.

“I will. But you might find it cold, right?” An easy excuse, because he hadn’t been lying but he had been exaggerating and there were things he was too selfish to do for them. He was never, ever going to admit that.

“Then to your length, the fuck do I care? Do it.” Baring their nape to him, their bent their head. The bun and curled ringlets hanging from it came off easily, and he put that gently on the floor next to his legs. After that it was just the details, and he shivered with the feeling of thin strands of their hair in between his fingers, their pulse under his hands. When it was over, he sat back and let his trembling muscles relax.

Chara ran a hand through their hair – just lower than the lobes of their ears, and slightly longer at the front where he hadn’t bothered to cut – and stood up slowly. He wanted to say something about being careful of the broken mirror (something stupid: they’d laugh at him, he was sure) but then they turned around to stand over him, and what could he say then? They were smiling a real smile, triumphant, with their hands on their hips and their eyes smudged in black and their skirt in tatters around their legs.

And he, kneeling and staring, was a supplicant at their feet.


	5. A World We Can Both Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, the actual last chapter this time. Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> Serious warnings for dysphoria, misgendering, abuse (never shown 'on-screen'), and we're definitely into co-dependence territory as well (Asriel please stop)
> 
> Because it's now relevant: moonflowers - dreaming of love, agave - ‘I remain well disposed to you despite your knavery’

They stayed up talking for most of the night, and he couldn’t remember when they both fell asleep. All he knew was that when he woke up, Chara was dressed in clothes that were intact and they were standing on the balcony. The sun was already well in the sky, and there was a tray of food on the table. Asriel looked at it dumbly for a minute or so, trying to order his memories.

He was so content he thought he never wanted to move again, but that was childish. Chara was going to have to present themself (with their new, shorter hair that he noticed they’d trimmed again) to their parents. The idea polluted every other emotion in him.

But he didn’t say that: instead, he looked at the tray on the low table in front of him. “About your, uh, situation. Is Frisk the same?”

Chara whipped around. “You’re awake.”

“Barely.”

They smiled, and it hardly looked stiff at all. Their new hair framed their face better, or maybe they just looked more comfortable anyway. He liked it: he liked it so much that he thought he never wanted to stop looking at them.

“They are,” they eventually replied.

“Do people, uh…believe them?”

“No.”

“But they’ve never said anything about that!”

Chara snorted. “Are you surprised? They wouldn’t complain if someone disembowelled them in cold blood. They’d probably just apologise meekly for getting blood everywhere.” They joked, but the mocking grin was tight.

“That’s, uh, not good.”

“No, it’s not, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Asriel nodded, sitting up and running a hand through his hair. It felt distant again and he smothered the thought before he lost himself in the crevices of a body that wasn’t his. He concentrated on Chara instead. “What are you going to do now?”

“Go to see my parents. I’m late anyway.”

“That might not be a good idea.”

“Oh, it’s definitely not,” they shrugged. “But I have to do it eventually.”

“You don’t.”

They cocked their head at him and raised an eyebrow in an expression that looked suspiciously close to pity. “If you say so. I’m still going. I was just waiting for you to wake up.”

Brushing down their skirts as if nothing had changed, they began to walk towards the doors. Asriel watched them go, his head turning to follow them.

“If!” he blurted out. “If…it goes badly, come right back here. I’ll make it better, I swear.”

They looked at him blankly, and dropped their hand from where it was on the door handles to come and stand over him.

“And how would you do that?”

“You’d just have to trust me.”

“Wow, okay,” they flicked him on the forehead, then sighed. Their frown was swapped for a look of appraisal. “If that’s what you want, I promise I’ll come back.”

And then they were gone and he felt blinded by the afterimage they’d left in their place.

He ate and washed and dressed, and checked their room only to find it utterly empty of any sign that anything had happened there the night before. So he started knitting and abandoned it, then picked up a book and abandoned that, and started pacing as the hours wore on and Chara didn’t come back.

But he was certain. He knew exactly what he was going to do, and he’d be so welcoming – everyone would be so welcoming – that they’d enjoy it, he was sure. Anything would be better than this. He wanted to introduce them to a world where people actually gave love to others freely and unselfishly-

( _But you’re not exactly the best example of that, are you?_ a voice reminded him)

-and then they might be able to live happily. That was what he wanted for them. All he had to do was wait.

The waiting stretched into the evening, somehow. Frisk didn’t come at the normal time, and though he could see gardeners in the gardens and servants bustling about outside – and hear them, too – it was like the house was deserted. Worry crept in and gnawed at him and he couldn’t sit still. Energy vibrated through him and he needed to run: he’d had enough of this house, this world, these people. He just wanted to run.

To pass the time, he went in the library and took the books he and Chara had talked about, or the ones they’d said were their favourites. He wasn’t sure if he should bring any of their belongings, but it wouldn’t hurt to bring the books they liked. If they…if they didn’t want to come home with him, they could always just put them back. It was fine.

It was nearing sunset when the door opened and Frisk came in. they were out of breath, their face flushed and their composure completely gone. Their eyes latched onto him, standing in the middle of the room, and they ran to him.

“We need to get them out,” they whispered. “Their parents are going to send them away, to an academy or to get married or to something else: they haven’t decided. But we need to-!”

“I know,” Asriel grinned. “I know, and we’re all getting out together. You too, if you want to come.”

Their eyes widened but they didn’t say anything. They didn’t have the chance to: Chara came in before they could, and then Asriel’s attention was all on them. Holding Frisk’s hand and pulling them with him, he ran to stand before Chara and he felt like something in him went cold. There was an ugly blossom of bruising on one cheek and he could see the faint imprints of rings, the scratches where they’d broken the skin. He raised trembling fingers to cup their jaw. They leaned into the touch and that was the greatest victory he could have imagined. He felt like something was overflowing in his chest and all he wanted was to hold them.

“We need to go,” he said, voicing what all three of them must have been thinking.

“Where?” Chara smiled dryly. “You can’t do anything, Ree: they’re going to send me away, and you’re going to have to go, and-”

“You promised you’d trust me, so let’s go. I’m begging you. Please, Chara: just come with me,” he choked and stumbled over the words. They looked at him a moment longer, closed their eyes, and sighed.

“I hate you for making me think you might actually be able to do something. Frisk, can you get food and water? We’re going to need things to travel.”

“No, we won’t,” Asriel shook his head and kept Frisk firmly in place even though he could see they were already raring to leave. “You just need to follow me. I have something to tell you, and it needs to be done in private, and then everything will be absolutely fine.” He smiled. “You trust me, don’t you?”

It was decided that he and Chara would go on ahead to the beach. Frisk wanted to say goodbye to their friends, so they’d meet them there and then all three of them would leave together. Chara didn’t protest or say anything when Asriel showed them the bag of books, and they had nothing they wanted to add, so that was that. Frisk left the room first, and then they snuck out, leaving the main room unlit and stuffy with the smell of dying moonflowers.

Servants bowed their heads when they passed, hand in hand, running through the house. No one raised an alarm, if there was even one to be raised, and some even smiled as they passed. Chara’s stiff smile was on permanently. They didn’t have the stamina to run all the way, so Asriel made sure to slow the pace when they got to the ground floor, and then – after a quick check around doors to make sure none of their family were around, not that Asriel could have picked them out if they had been – they left through the front door.

The path leading from it was just as Asriel remembered – bordered by giant agave plants – and they jogged past them until they got to the dunes, and then it was a lopsided scramble through sand, running parallel to the beach until they had to slow down and walk. Neither of them spoke until the sun had set over the retreating tide and they reached a small outcrop of rock pools.

“Do you want me to carry you?” Asriel asked them, hesitantly, eyeing the glints of water and seaweed that hung over the path in front of them.

“You’re kidding, right?” Chara looked him up and down. “Have you seen yourself recently? You wouldn’t last three steps.” With that said, they lifted their skirts up and started walking along the rock pools to get to the coves beyond, where they’d agreed to meet Frisk. Asriel took a moment to get over his wounded pride (not that it really mattered, he thought: just wait until he got his actual body back, _then_ they’d see) before following them with the bag of books.

As the moon started to gleam down on them, they finally stopped and sat down in the sand. The cliffs stretched up above them; the sea air was just too cold to let them feel uncomfortably hot after the exercise. The beach was deserted; there was only the sound of waves around them. Asriel wondered if he had enough courage to do what he had to.

“So now we wait,” he said airily.

“We do. You said you had something you needed to tell us.”

“You. Not them. Well, them too, but you first, I guess.” To avoid their eyes, he looked up at the star-speckled sky. Was it coming close to a month? He couldn’t tell: he’d lost track. He hadn’t even been counting, if he was honest.

“Um,” he started, because they weren’t saying anything and he was sure they were just watching him. “This is going to be very weird and I can only apologise for that. Oh gosh, this is going to be awful. But you have to know that what I’m going to say is this truth, and what happens after that is supposed to happen. Just…please don’t be scared. I’m sorry.”

Because that was the way one did such things, he turned to look at them properly, and tried to ignore how confused they looked. He wished the setting could be better (even though a moonlit beach was pretty romantic, all things considered), or the timing, or anything. But it was what it was.

So he just said it. “I love you.”

Their eyes widened a fraction, he thought, but then he couldn’t see anything because there was a flash of light and sudden darkness.

 

Asriel woke up to someone calling his name, except not. It wasn’t his name: it was still a nickname. He was too groggy to really care.

That snapped straight into ‘caring really very much’ when he recognised that it was Chara calling him, Chara sitting over him, looking at him with their hair hanging down and their lips in a tight, worried line.

It took him a moment or so more to realise that he was himself again. There was weight to him that he’d missed; size to him that he hadn’t felt in too long; the sand didn’t scrape into his skin because there was something covering it now. Blearily, he lifted a hand and squeezed his fingers together onto the leathery black pads of his palm.

He was him.

Making an appalling squeaking noise, he tried to sit up, realised they were in the way, aborted the movement halfway through, and shuffled backwards. It was around this time that he realised how painfully tight his clothes were on him but he decided he wasn’t going to pay any attention to that because he simply had too much to pay attention to already.

Chara’s face wasn’t immediately legible in the darkness from his new angle, but he didn’t think they were scared or disgusted. Small victories.

“Ree?” they asked in an admirably sure voice.

“Y-yes!” he managed to choke out. “Or no, I mean, sort of? But my name’s actually Asriel. Sorry.”

They stayed very still, their hands pressed on their thighs. When they spoke, it was all in one sharp exhale. “Oh, holy fuck. You’re the monster prince.”

“Uh. Yeah. I guess I am, yeah.”

Their shoulders sunk down as they put their head in their hands. “ _Fuck_.”

“C-Chara? Are you…are you okay?” He dearly wanted to reach out and touch them, but how was he supposed to do that with his own hands? They probably didn’t even want him anywhere near them. He’d got it all wrong. Digging his hands down into the sand until it was freezing all around his fingers, he bit his lip.

“Okay? Of course I’m not okay!” With a bitter laugh they lifted their head to look at him and all he saw was shadow. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? I fell in love with a _prince_!”

“…you, uh. You what?”

“I don’t know how to do this! I don’t know what to do! Am I supposed to keep you well away from me or pull you closer? Am I supposed to feel this relieved that you’re not human? Am I supposed to be so scared that you’re a prince? Am I supposed to do anything? I don’t get it! You’re….oh hell, Ree, Asriel, you’re _you_!”

He was losing the thread of conversation more and more by the second.

“Chara, I don’t…I don’t think I really understand, but…don’t I disgust you?”

He could practically feel their glare. “Disgust me? Why would you disgust me? This is better. You’re still you, you’re just…furrier. And bigger.” They paused. “A lot bigger.”

Trying to ignore the strength of the pull he felt towards them, he shuffled forwards a little so it didn’t seem so much like there was a barrier between them, and so he could actually see their face.

He wasn’t quite sure what to do next. He knew what he wanted to do, but he was so nervous, and there were things to be done before that. Luckily, they spoke first.

“So your plan was to take me and Frisk back to your palace?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“And are you going to explain how you were human?”

He looked over towards the sea. “Um. Gosh, this is actually really embarrassing, but I guess you should know. I sort of…a year ago I fell in love with you, because I saw you on that cliff where we first met. For a year I watched you, and then I was so desperate that I _might_ possibly have wished to a goddess to do something about it. She turned me into a human temporarily with the condition that I couldn’t ever say anything about how I felt or I’d be turned back. And then I met you and everything went wrong and you were nothing like I thought, and then…Then things changed again. And you’re still nothing like I thought, but I love you, probably a lot more than I ever did before any of this happened.”

The sea made gentle sounds beside them and the wind blew through trees high on the cliffs. It was atmospheric, Asriel thought. But Chara wasn’t saying anything.

With his heart pounding in his ears, he started to go through every word he’d said to pick out where he’d gone wrong, how he could fix it. It was still almost too much for him to bear, but he knew he hadn’t imagined them saying they loved him too. So where had he messed up? How could he bring this back?

They sighed deeply and fully, and then they looked at him as if this was a meeting and they were both utterly emotionally distanced from the whole affair. This held for a few seconds before their expression broke into distress. “I’m sorry,” they said, clutching at the material around their legs and gritting their teeth. “I’m so sorry, I don’t…I don’t know how to reply to that. I guess I feel the same – or I know I do – but I’ve never been told that before and I don’t know how I’m supposed to act now, and Frisk is the only one who’s ever said they cared for me, and they’re…Fuck, I don’t know, they’re _them_. They only ever see other people: it’s like they’re not happy if they’re not living for someone else’s sake. It’s not the same.”

Asriel held his hands up helplessly. “You just have to do what comes naturally, Chara. I’m not asking more of you than that. I want you, and I want you to be comfortable. That’s all.”

“That’s not true: you have expectations of me and things you want me to be and I don’t _know_ them, I don’t know how to please you!”

Feeling lost, he shuffled closer to them, taking their hand in his with infinitely slow movements so they could pull back at any time (and their hand was so _small_ in his now). He stroked a finger-pad across their knuckles and brought the back of their hand to his lips, looking up into their face twisted with upset.

He grappled to find words. “You please me just by being you. I don’t…I know you might not believe it right now, but that’s really all I want. I’m not expecting anything else.” A lie, but a small lie. “And we can work through this together. Just take it slowly? I’ll be here for you, either way. I’ll support you. And you know you can trust me.”

They nodded curtly, their hand limp in his. He stroked circles on the back of it, trying to be comforting, still terrified that they would be scared of him, but then they leant forwards just enough for their forehead to rest against his chest and he felt like he couldn’t breathe anymore.

“I’m sorry,” they said. “It’s been a very long day and I don’t know what to do. I’m not used to this.”

“That’s okay,” he said in a strangled voice, reminding himself over and over that he couldn’t hug them, he couldn’t give them so much contact right away. Small steps.

His mind was reeling with the need to be closer and the inability to breathe with them so close already. Grappling desperately for some sort of anchor, he said, “We should dance.”

“We should what,” they muttered against his chest, but they sounded more in control of themself than they had before, so he latched onto that.

“You said before that we should, so let’s do it now. Let’s dance.”

“With what music?” They lifted their head up to look at him.

“A fair point. I’ll hum something simple, I guess? We should do it. Please. Everything’s weird right now and I want it to just be us, like it was before. So please.”

They tilted their head. “You said you couldn’t dance.”

“I couldn’t in that body. I can in this one. I mean, at least a waltz. I could do that.” Another lie: he could do much more and he generally hated waltzes, but this was a very specific situation and he knew it was a waltz or nothing.

“Fine.”

He hadn’t been expecting them to actually agree, but he rose to the occasion, standing up with them in too-tight clothes and a body that didn’t even feel fit for breathing, let alone dancing. But he swallowed his embarrassment and let Chara put his arms on their shoulder and waist anyway, let them put their arms around him (in perfect position: everything they did was perfect), and he began to hum.

Dancing on sand was bizarre. Dancing with a partner whose head only came to mid-way up his chest was stranger. It was an odd experience, generally.

Asriel thought his heart was going to explode.

Everything felt light and fluffy and not quite real: somewhere between dreams and fantasies, where Chara was spinning in his arms like they belonged there, and he could feel their chest pressed up against his and their hands held in his and everything of them was in harmony with everything of him even though there was only what music he could give them. They began to count the steps with him, tunelessly, and they managed a small smile up at him.

It was enough to whisk his breath away, leaving him gaping and defenceless in the face of them.

His steps faltered and they came to a stop. Chara was breathing heavily but Asriel was in his own body and if his heart was pounding, it was nothing to do with the exercise. They looked up into his eyes and squeezed his hands, their lips turning up by just a hair. And that was enough to convince him that they were okay. And, that being the case, he moved his hand to support the small of their back and leant down to kiss them.

After a second of hesitation, they wrapped their arms around his neck and leant up into him. They didn’t recoil, they didn’t stab him through with looks of repulsion: they kissed him back.

In any other state of mind, he might actually have been able to appreciate it. But he could barely think, and when they broke apart it was like he was drowning in everything he hadn’t been able to feel while he was numb with them.

There wasn’t anything he could think of to say, but he thought that might be alright. Chara’s face was flushed and their lips looked thoroughly kissed and he honestly didn’t think he’d have been able to say anything intelligent anyway, seeing them like that.

Quite suddenly, their eyes narrowed and they looked behind him. Asriel was about to ask what the matter was when they called out, “Frisk, are you quite done spying on us?”

Choking a little, Asriel whirled round to see Frisk dimly lit up by the moon, grinning sheepishly as they walked up towards them.

“How long have you even been there?!” he wailed.

“Since a little after you woke up,” they said in a whispery voice, shrugging. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Feeling rather like he was going to die of shame, Asriel covered his face with one hand and looked at his feet. The other hand was held firmly by Chara and he was not going to change that for the world.

“So you heard? You’re okay with it?” they asked Frisk, their voice gentle.

Frisk put a finger to their chin and lifted their head as if in thought, and then grinned widely. “Absolutely!”

“And you’re not just saying that because I’m going?” Chara asked sternly.

“Course I’m not.”

“You don’t have to. You can do what you want. You don’t have to go back to that house: you’re friendly and hard-working and anyone would be happy to have you. You really don’t have to follow me just because I saved you years ago.”

Asriel felt utterly detached from the situation, but Chara’s hand was still on his so he didn’t think he minded. He watched Frisk’s expression (comically twisted up in some internal debate, and then relaxed into their usual blissful smile).

“I see what you’re saying, but also, why would I pass up the chance to go and live with monsters? I want to come. It’s not just because of _that_ -”

“Like hell it’s not.”

“Shush,” they flapped their hands in a placating manner. “Let’s pretend it’s not. Okay? I want to come.”

Asriel and Chara shared a concerned look, but he wasn’t really sure what to do and they didn’t offer any explanation. And if Frisk said they wanted to come, there was no reason they shouldn’t.

Besides, they didn’t even seem surprised by Asriel’s real body. They just kept looking at him curiously: it was only innocent acceptance, not a hint of disgust anywhere on them. It really was all so easy, easier that Asriel had even dared to imagine. Even if there was a mountain of explanations and arrangements to make later on, he was happy. This wasn’t love built of dreams and ideals: this was _his_ love, really and truly, and he barely knew how to keep it contained in his body.

His hand still in Chara’s, the three of them began to walk back home.

 

 

*

 

 

He couldn’t find them.

Asriel heaved a heavy sigh and decided he might as well check the practice fields. Frisk would be there, at least, and he could always ask them. So he walked – not too fast, because people would see him and ask what the trouble was – through the long hallways down through the palace, trying not to show how impatient he was.

Frisk was, predictably, practicing with Undyne. She seemed to be shouting encouraging things to them while they hit a dummy with a stick. Well, it was rather more like ‘gently thwacking’ than hitting. Hardly more than a caress, really. It had been like this for months, but they were getting exercise and sunlight and building relationships with the other guards, so Asriel didn’t think it mattered too much. Undyne was always angry anyway: she could handle a bit more aggravation.

“Excuse me!” he called pointedly and both of them looked up to see him. Frisk’s face widened in a beam and Undyne put a hand on her hip (he could practically already see her complaining about him interrupting them). “Frisk, you, uh, you don’t know where Chara is, do you?”

Undyne scoffed. “Have you checked the library?”

“I have checked all four.” He stuck his tongue out at her and she thumped him.

“Have you checked the new one?” Frisk asked softly. They both looked at them.

“The new one?”

“Yeah. They started a new, illicit one in the wine cellar.”

Undyne frowned. “It’s not really illicit, though, right? No one’s actually going to stop them. They could ask and we’d give them ten more libraries if that’s what they wanted.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Frisk started to explain patiently, but Asriel was already thanking them hurriedly and running off. What did they _mean_ , Chara had started a new library without telling him? He supposed that in the scheme of things it didn’t really matter, but how _could_ they? They were supposed to tell him everything: that was the deal they’d made together to keep Chara safe and comfortable in the palace. They told him everything, he told them everything – they were tied together in self-imposed bindings, never to be broken apart. That was how it was supposed to work!

Skidding around a corner past one of the longer dining rooms, he reflected that perhaps it was a good thing. Perhaps this was a sign they were becoming healthier and more independent. That was good, right? That had to be good, right?

Of course it fucking wasn’t.

He slowed to a stately walk as he went by the kitchens, smiling perfectly and waving to everyone cooking there (and thanking whatever star was smiling down on him that his mother wasn’t there, because he did not need another talk about leaving Chara to their own devices, not now). Then it was just down some flights of stone stairs, his steps the only sound once the heavy wooden door was closed behind him, and he was in the freezing wine cellar.

There were torches lit around the place and he started to look around. It was called a wine cellar, but really it was mostly for preserves and huge barrels of snails and that sort of thing. There was wine, of course, but that was further in: rows of bottles in curved holders, gleaming in the light like beetles.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t even sure how one was supposed to make a library in a space like this. Why would they choose the wine cellar? It was clean enough, but there were still spiders and bugs and the musty smell of preservation with a faint undertone of vinegar and really, there were just so many nicer places to start a new library. His room, for example, or theirs, or the connecting room between the two. Lots of choice.

His steps rang out, echoing under the arched stone ceilings as he walked from room to room, and he hoped that was enough warning. He didn’t want to have to call out for them as well, and he was just pondering this when he stumbled across them almost by mistake. They were looking up at him with an eyebrow raised, sitting back against a sack of what looked like flour, surrounded by books and reading one of them by the light of the torch just above them.

Asriel blinked. “Okay, when Frisk said an ‘illicit library’, this isn’t really what I was expecting.”

“You can’t blame me for that one.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” He sat down cross-legged in front of them, his knees just touching theirs through the material of their trousers. He was going to miss all the skirts they’d once worn, but their comfort came first. He was starting to think he should switch to skirts himself, anyway.

“So what is this? Don’t you like the libraries? The eastern wing’s one is pretty good: not many people go there and it’s very shady.”

“Sure, but it’s not a wine cellar, is it? When you’re reading horror, sometimes the shady pleasantness of libraries doesn’t cut it.” They put the book down, shuffling forwards to take his hands in theirs, playing with his palm pads.

“Is that the truth?”

“Not really.”

“Okay.” He stiffened a little when they poked his pads particularly hard. One day he was going to tell them how ticklish that was, but for the time being he’d bear it alone valiantly. “You know you can tell me anything that’s bothering you, right?”

“Of course I know. It’s not very interesting: I just like the cold.”

“That’s also a lie.”

“Well, it’s not, but it’s not the truth.” They sighed, dropping his hands, much to his dismay. “The libraries are all too much like the ones I’m used to. I don’t like the constant feeling that I’m hiding, that any creak of floorboards or opening of doors is going to be someone calling me to my parents. Wine cellars are easier.”

“Oh.” Anger growled inside him and he had the urge to hold them, to protect them from their own memories, which was absurd. But they’d told him they didn’t mind that sort of contact, if it was with him, so he leant forwards to hug them to him, stroking their back and kissing the top of their head because he couldn’t help himself. “You know you can take the books out if you want? Or just ask the librarian to pick some out for you and then go read in the gardens or something. Whatever’s comfortable for you.”

They made a non-committal sort of grunt and nuzzled closer into his chest. “Aren’t you supposed to be studying?”

“I might have left early to come and find you.”

Snorting, they asked, “Why?”

“No reason. You just make me happy and I wanted to be happy so I decided to look for you.”

“That’s kind of disgusting,” they said in a voice that seemed more embarrassed than disgusted, so he laughed nervously and held them tighter.

“We _are_ supposed to be totally honest with each other, right?”

Another non-committal grunt, but they shuffled closer until they were essentially sitting in his lap, and then they moved back their head so they could kiss him, and that was all the answer he needed.

He’d work on helping them out of the wine cellar later.

**Author's Note:**

> Other contenders for Asriel's fake name (not all mine, don't blame me): Elias, Leirsa, Capricorn, Hugh Mann, Jimmy Definitely-Not-A-Monster


End file.
